Race is (Largely) Fake

Unpacking both the scientific and socially constructed notions of "race," and offering solutions to the discursive problems therein

I’d been mulling over this topic for a while. Recently, I’d referenced Robert Sussman’s Myth of Race in passing (more the title and the core argument than the book itself), and I saw a surprising amount of reaction. I’ve covered topics related to race before, including a recent Twitter Space about affirmative action & DEI. I’ve said my piece in regards to specific, discreet issues. And I am of course a Melanated American, so there is an argument—however tendentious—that race is an omnipresent factor in everything I say or do.

But I almost never explicitly tackled race itself in depth. Perhaps out of disinterest, apprehension, diffidence, something else, or a combination thereof. Whatever the case for my previous hesitation, I’m now committed to addressing the topic head on. I think, at the risk of self-importance, that I owe it to you, dear reader, and the world at large. The biggest problem with how the dubious concept of race functions in sociopolitical thought and discourse is that too few people tell the truth about it. We lie, to ourselves and to the wider world, about this thing called “race,” and we avoid telling the truth about it for fear of offense and outcasting.

Alas, I’m already a heretic, a dissident, and a heterodox thinker, so I’m free to spout unconventional and inconvenient truths. I am also black, and thus have a sort of melanin shield in the realms of The Discourse™. A black man can more freely speak on the nature of race, and racism, and race realism (racialism) than almost any other man, certainly moreso than a white man; he will be listened to more respectfully, if still fitfully, in addition. This is a double standard to be sure, and one of many pernicious problems with race and how we internalize it. Ah, but forgive me, as I’m already digressing a bit.

Let’s start from the top.

What is race? And why is it a “myth” (per Sussman) or “fake” (per Que) in reality?

Race is a term used to basically invoke, or apply to, several related but distinct areas of both hard and soft science. Principally:

1. Continental ancestry group (CAG), an established concept in genetics and medicine, among other hard sciences

2. Ethnicity, a sociological category

3. Body phenotype, a partial self-coinage which I’ll expand upon below…

Firstly, I will stipulate to the fact layer that continental ancestry groups (CAGs) are real. (I often talk, on here and elsewhere, about how there two layers of conversation and epistemology - the fact layer and the opinion layer.) CAGs are a taxonomy that can be roughly applied to various batches of peoples based on the primary or dominant geo-historic roots of their family line. A person whose family were most closely tied to the African continent, especially the sub-Sahara region, for several generations, would be part of the broader African CAG, for example. Same for European, East Asian, Native/Indigenous American, and so on.

You may already be noticing a few problems here. Chief among them is that, particularly from the 17th century onward, peoples have moved around across continents extensively. That movement wasn’t just travel, but long-term resettling into different regions than those of their forebears, and a ton of resultant genetic mixing of various CAGs. So while individuals today may still have DNA with an overwhelming bias towards a specific continental region (and thus certain per se CAG), they will also often have elements of multiple CAGs in their genome. To say that a person like this belongs to a single CAG is, at minimum, a slightly problematic and essentialist proposition. But for the racial notions that are built loosely off of CAG to be durable, such essentialism is a prerequisite. All this without even mentioning the wealth of heavily mixed persons and clusters—such that we couldn’t meaningfully assign a dominant CAG to them—that account for the various people of the Earth today.

In short, the “races” aren’t pure, and CAGs only tell geneticists and medical doctors limited things. What sort of things? Well, it’s here that I’ll affirm another set of fact claims and bit bullets: The CAG-based differences in IQ and athletics are real, as are things like sickle cell trait, Asian flush, and “white” people sunburning more easily. However, CAGs still have a ton of internal and external variability, meaning that any individual from predominantly one CAG cannot be presumed stereotypically to have any definitive nature or elaborate set of characteristics based solely on that CAG. In practice as well, most/all of these facts are basically trivia in regular people’s lives. A race realist interpretation of race, and of epistemic reality, doesn’t really make much space for such mutability, except to say it’s only a narrow counter-weight to their view. But again, if race is real, shouldn’t it be more conceptually sturdy? Surely it needn’t require special pleading.

Onwards to #2 on our list. Ethnicity is tricky because it’s often used interchangeably with the way we colloquially think of, and refer to, race today. Unlike CAG, ethnicity isn’t a strictly medical term. It’s primarily a social science postulation. People fit into ethnicities based on “having a shared culture (e.g., language, food, music, dress, values, and beliefs) related to common ancestry and shared history,“ per the American Psychological Association (APA) Dictionary of Psychology. The APA carves out a slightly distinct idea for what race is: “social construction and categorization of people based on perceived shared physical traits that result in the maintenance of a sociopolitical hierarchy. The term is also loosely applied to geographic, cultural, religious, or national groups. Self-reported race frequently varies owing to changing social contexts and an individual’s possible identification with more than one race.“

I should also note a notable quirk of the United States government’s census category of Ethnicity, on top of these APA definitions; it specifically only calls out the difference between Hispanic (hereditarily/culturally tied to Spain) or non-Hispanic. This would seem to only further confuse the matter, especially since national origin is ostensibly more of a racial thing than an ethnic one (at least per APA and others). Again, we see how race is, for lack of a better word, unreal. We draw these lines subjectively and can capriciously change or confuse them later.

Look no further than the fraught ideas of “whiteness.” It’s ostensibly tied European ancestry, but the amount of argument over who counts as white puts the lie to how viable and rigorous the label is. Are Mediterranean or West Asian groups white? Hell, even South Asians, in some cases, have been called “white.” What of those aforementioned Hispanics and their racial correlate of “Latino”? Let’s also not forget about the ethnoreligious group known as Jews (of which there are actually multiple distinct CAGs, mostly notably Ashkenazi). Suffice to say, the lack of a consistent standard here is another strong indicator as to the overarching question of race’s fakeness.

So in the spirit of social construction, I offer my preferred term for a lot of the ideas and characteristics we associate with race: Body phenotype (BP). Put simply, phenotype is the term for the set of observable characteristics of an individual. I should acknowledge that it’s technically meant to encompass more than the basic markers we’d traditionally associate with race. So whereas one’s race could amount to one’s skin tone, physiology, and related visible attributes, one’s phenotype might technically include their blood type and mental makeup. This is why the “body” prefix is a useful clarifier.

I invoke BP over race for a number reasons, one of which is admittedly a lack of better options. By its very verbal nature, “phenotype” just sounds more neutral, detached, and scientifically clean than “race.” It’s also more precise. By using it, one can clearly indicate that they’re referring purely to discreet physiological features. What is “white” in this context, for example? Pale skin, a tendency to sunburn easier, greater variability in hair and eye color. The “black” BP is conversely associated with darker skin tone (melanated), greater sun resistance, naturally dark and curly hair, so on. And again, all of these differences are largely trivial.

BP is useful for taking the bite out of group difference discourse, and remembering that all we’re getting at is a loose taxonomy. Your body BP shouldn't have greater bearing on your life or character than, say, whether you’re right-handed or left-handed. If I call someone “white,” I’m literally just pattern-matching their skin tone to a term which is broadly applicable to people who look like them, similar to calling someone a blonde or brunette based on their hair color. That’s how we ought to think of these things anyway.

Who believes most fervently in race, and why?

Which brings me to the elephant in the room of any semi-academic discussion of race and science: Human biodiversity (HBD), a field of thought and debatable study favored by race realists. I should note here that the HBD acronym is often used online for slightly obscurantist reasons, specifically to avoid visibility and critique, rather than just for brevity. This impulse to shy away from scrutiny is just one of many issues with the community. HBD is built on the notion that many, if not all, physical and psychological differences between descendants of various CAGs can be explained by that ancestry in itself. A sort of race-based determinism, all encompassing in scope. HBD is something that easily falls into pseudo-science and rank quackery, for the simple reason that it’s favored and “practiced” (such that this word even applies) by biased parties with questionable motives.

I’ll take this moment to make a slight detour before further addressing race realists and other race essentialists actually. An earlier version of this piece had been a much more searing polemic against race realism and race “science.” I decided against that, both because monologuing about the crimethink nature of people and ideologies I disagree with isn’t always terribly a convincing approach, and due to the fact that I think race’s fakeness speaks for itself on some level. I needn’t throw my opponents to the metaphorical wood-chipper just to make my point. I actually think this is one weakness of the way Sussman prosecutes his own case in The Myth of Race. For my part, I’d rather establish why the complicated, nuanced truth of the matter is more sound than the muddled, anti-scientific and simplistic alternatives on offer from race realists.

Nevertheless, we must reckon with them head on for a paragraph or so, if only to give full context. Race realism holds to ideas of race’s predictive power, then makes normative claims about the behavior of the various so-called races (Asian, Latino, black, white, etc). Race realists would likely resent being called racists (i.e. bigots), but I think they would admit to holding views that are negatively regarded in the mainstream. They will point to the differences in IQ test results between CAGs, and sometimes even, in their more charitable moments, the athletic gaps between CAGs, as proof of their worldview. They favor a “realist” idea of race because many of the things they marshal as evidence for it are self-flattering. Race realists are overwhelmingly people that would count as white and/or East Asian. What a funny coincide that the race & IQ data reflects a point differential that’s positive for European and East Asian CAGs. Surely stuff like that has no bearing on their interests. Indeed, the cultural meme of Bask In Reflected Glory (BIRG) pretty much explains what’s going on here. A race realist will inevitably be someone inclined to BIRG and then back rationalize their views with selective samplings of the available data.

Speaking of the data, what happens when the science around supposed racial differences isn’t as clear cut? For example, data on behavior. A race realist would likely subscribe to a theory of human nature which centers race as a causal factor on things like violent crime, facility with language, and more. Why are black people more likely to be involved in violent crime, and to be incarcerated, than East Asians? Race realists would posit answers born of genes. DNA is destiny in their view. As for the cases where blacks and other groups do not neatly fall into these predictable patterns? Well, they are simply exceptions which prove the rule, or at least the race realist would probably say something along those lines.

In this way, race realists are actually somewhat similar to other race essentialists. Consider political racial identity groups like white nationalists and black nationalists, who preach racial separatism and supremacy. Or activists like the so-called “anti-racism” movement, including Ibram x Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. They would also insist that race was the predominant factor here, but further argue that a nebulous boogeyman like “structural racism” was using people’s racial identities against them, all as a pretext for mass victimization. “Race is real,” they seem to say, “but we must simply restructure society in ways which are more favorable to the oppressed or ‘good’ races and less sympathetic to the oppressive or ‘bad’ races.” (See one of my previous pieces for more on this particular line of toxic thought.)

All this reminds us that there’s a strange stagnancy to race that’s born not just of inertia or apathy but due to consistent efforts from interested parties. Race essentialism (racialism) is complicated and pernicious specifically because it’s trafficked by all manner of different groups and ideologies, like those mentioned above. Maybe a Latino identitarian favors commonplace notions of race because they’re politically useful and expedient. Maybe an Asian rights activist employs race in service of uplift one day, then revanchism the next. Maybe a white nationalist favors racialist reasons of separatism and self-flattery. Maybe a black nationalist does something along basically similar lines as his white counterpart, even if the society at large chooses to pretend these two ideologies are somehow completely different. In a way, we like to imagine that we can accurately and reliably recognize race essentialism as evil in one context yet treat it as conveniently benign or even positive in another. We do this despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Conclusion

To my mind, most/all racialism, like all racism, is inherently wrong (both factually and morally). It’s illogical, inconsistent, incoherent. It leads us to say nonsense like “Hispanics aren’t white” as a general rule, even though Spain is literally a European (“white”) country. It encourages divisive, identitarian, and even supremacist notions of race-based norms and moral imperatives. And for what? A sense of shared group adherence and satisfaction that’s often built on nothing but looks. This is where all that BIRGing leads, and the BIRG mindset is the core underpinning for race science, race pride, and so on.

Imagine building entire your life and persona around what color your eyes were, or the fact that no one in your family needs sunblock, or how long it took your ancestors to leave the old country. It’s so reductive and hollow. So small and backward-focused.

I favor a vision of myself, and the world, that’s maximally inclusive of more than just the immutability of appearance, and is forward-facing enough to imagine more for us than the road map supposedly laid out by hereditary biology. I am, first and foremost, a writer and thinker, and my future is determined principally by that. I am secondly an American man, with all the cultural and gendered implications entailed. And yes, thirdly, I’m a phenotypically black person. But who cares about that? Race is fake.

Bibliography

Constantinescu, AE., Mitchell, R.E., Zheng, J. et al. A framework for research into continental ancestry groups of the UK Biobank. Hum Genomics 16, 3 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40246-022-00380-5

Herrnstein, Richard J., & Murray, Charles A. The Bell Curve. Free Press. 1994

Johnson, R. (2003). Was the British Empire racialist or racist?. In: British Imperialism. Histories and Controversies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4031-5_8

McWhorter, John H. Woke Racism. Penguin Audio, 2021.

Sailer, Steve. Noticing, 1973-2023, Passage Publishing

Sussman, Robert Wald. The Myth of Race. Harvard University Press, 2014