Biologically baseless with immesurable social impact

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his book Between the World in Me that “racism is the father of race.” I teach that to my students every semester. Racism created race, not the other way around. The categorization of people according to a perceived racial difference was one of the worst mistake every to be called scientific, based on assumptions about “native” versus European peoples rather than empirical evidence. We now know that race is not expressed in our genes; in many cases there are more genetic difference between people of the same race that between people of different races. That’s a hard bit of knowledge to swallow, but it is essential learning. An idea that has impacted so many lives for so many centuries in the United States is without merit.