Gilroy’s theory that there is no individual race due to the great levels of cultural mixing that occurred during the period of Circum-Atlantic trade emphasizes the necessity to look at individuals as beings of multiple influences, but fails to look at those influences as singular entities in and of themselves. I think Gilroy highlights this idea well when he describes Delany’s tour of Africa, saying that the tour “confirmed the dissimilarities between African-American ideologues and the Africans with whom they treated,” (24). The idea that race is an objectively improper descriptor of a human being is justified by this emotional distance from one’s “homeland” and the lack of emotional response that occurs upon “homecoming” after exile. But I believe Gilroy’s argument that all human beings in the Circum-Atlantic area maintain some form of cultural unity with one another is flawed due to the strength of an origin point’s influence over an individual.
Gilroy describes a difficulty with thinking in black and white terms as “the overintegrated conceptions of pure and homogeneous culture which mean that black political struggles are construed as somehow automatically expressive of the national or ethnic differences with which they are associated,” (31). Essentially, he is saying that black political concerns will always be construed with racial implications if homogeneous thinking continues in society. But, I do not believe that the racial implications of political arguments regarding any race of people can be ignored. I agree that the rationality to think in terms of race is utterly flawed when describing human beings, but I do not believe we realistically have the ability to live in a post-racial world. As much as one can argue that the characters of people are a result of a heterogeneous cultural mixing, it cannot be ignored that there are origin points that led to the mixing in the first place. Origin points are the beginnings of the cultural mixing that Gilroy describes, so this mixing could not exist without them. I think his plea to focus on the heterogeneous rather than homogeneous is a noble one, but to dispel with the notion of origins would completely eliminate the presence of a heterogeneous culture. Without origins, people would be left without cultural definers.