In the preface to his new book, A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Integration, and the Future of America, Calvin Baker argues that full racial integration is the most radical—and unrealized—idea in American politics.

Our current notion of race began on the dim edge of the Middle Ages, before the universe was heliocentric, before we knew gravity. At best, it was a primitive, tentative grasp toward understanding the physical world; at worst, it was a way of asserting the primacy of one tribe over another. When it was considered in earnest by science, it was initially rejected. James Cowles Prichard, a physician and opponent of slavery from Bristol who was the leading British scholar of race, wrote in an 1813 book entitled Researches into the Physical History of Man that “On the whole, it appears that we may with a high degree of probability draw the inference, that all the different races into which the human species is divided, originated from one family.”

Race’s true usefulness, however, was not to science but as a technology of war, of depopulating continents, seizing the wealth of others, erasing the beauty and wisdom of unknown cultures, enslaving people, and otherwise dividing humanity for imperial gain: all the material forces we talk about so often, which we now so clearly know threaten to destroy the world.

Just as crucially, beneath all this there is a racial ego that goes beyond reason and even material greed. This racial ego, which asserts the superiority of one person over another based on nothing except phenotype, has always informed both individual and group self-perception. It continues to perform this function in our own time, even as interconnectivity has increased, science has thoroughly debunked race, and most of us, if not always our presidents, kings, queens, and ministers, embrace the diversity of peoples and cultures as belonging to a universal humanity equally worthy of respect, even awe.

This isn’t a book about globalization, or colonialism, or even race, but about a concept I think of more vital importance to the world as it is and not as it was: integration. It is a deceptively simple term, one we think we understand based on our received ideas, be they positive or negative. However, as we’ll see, the idea of integration has always been too frightening, too threatening to the status quo to ever consider fully, so much so that 20 years into this century we have barely begun to consider what it means.

Read the full article about integration by Calvin Baker at YES! Magazine.