Why We Should Get Rid of Race

Centuries ago, a terrible idea was born, an idea that ravaged the world, that justified and fed the flames of war and genocide, torture, brutal oppression and the institutionalization of slavery—among other atrocities. This terrible invention was the concept of race. Its blood-drenched history is plain for anyone to see. Because of the invention of race, untold millions died in the European colonization of Africa (as many as ten million in the Congo alone). In the transatlantic slave trade, over two million humans perished even before more than twelve million reached their prison bases in other continents, where the unimaginable horrors of their inhumane treatment persisted. More than four thousand African Americans were lynched—often tortured, castrated, and burned to death before crowds of hundreds or thousands of eager spectators. The concept of race sits at the heart of the Namibian genocide (seventy-five thousand dead), the Holocaust (six million dead), the Armenian genocide (over one million dead), the Rwanda genocide (one million dead), and the ongoing genocide in Sudan—the list could go on and on. Weighed on a moral balance, it is incontestable that the concept of race has done vastly more harm than good.

The consequences of the idea of race are a feature, not a glitch. From the outset, the function of race was to oppress and dehumanize others. And yet, in spite of all the suffering it has wrought, race still permeates our lives and thought. We continue to casually check the “race” boxes on medical and census forms, on college and job applications, on licenses and surveys. It is second nature for us to categorize human beings racially. Some people cherish race as central to who they are, and some use it as a weapon to disparage those “others” who they deem not to be members of their own kind, obsessing about the question of who “qualifies” as belonging to one racial group or another—and who doesn’t. Mostly, we take all of this for granted as “the way things are.”

Why do we hang onto race, despite its many evils? Many do so because they think it is something real and tangible—an indisputable fact of human biology. But even though we are all socially marinated in the ideology of race, and are inclined to take its reality for granted in our everyday lives, the verdict from science is that race has no biological basis. Racial categories are not inscribed in our genes and our bodies. They are social artifacts, designed to do harm.

Others are well aware that there is no scientific basis to race, but they hang onto racial identity because they believe that races are socially rather than biologically real. For these people, racial solidarity is a means for reappropriating and empowering groups that had previously been marginalized and oppressed. They see race as something that is separable from racism, and they believe that we can and should embrace the former without endorsing the latter. I strenuously disagree with this commonsense view, because the facts tell a different, more disturbing story. Race is an illusion, and a destructive one.

The historical record is clear: racism birthed race, not the other way around. People didn’t observe that there are other races in the world, and afterwards develop racist attitudes toward them. History shows us that the idea of race was invented. It proliferated and persisted as a tool for legitimating oppression, wrecking lives, and strangling human potential. The legacy of the invention of race lives on in poverty, mass incarceration, police violence, and huge disparities in health, longevity, education, income, and wealth. And today in the United States the far right is waging a campaign to erase the hideous racial history at the root of today’s inequities and injustices. It seeks to teach our children that enslaved people benefitted from their enslavement and abuse, and that today they are afforded just as many opportunities as anyone else. Racism is ongoing and is increasingly emboldened by white supremacist groups across this country. And since the horrors committed by Hamas on October 7, and the brutal retaliation by Israel, blatant antisemitism and Islamophobia have reared their ugly heads. It has seeped into the political mainstream and is slowly but surely nudging the Overton window into the wrong direction.

It’s long past time that we consigned the fantasy of race to the garbage can of history. But race is sticky. Once socialized into it, people have a hard time seeing it for the evil that it is, and cling to it. Let’s push back. Let’s unmake race.