Does race have any scientific basis, or is it a social construct?
My view is that race doesn’t have a biological or genetic basis. It’s a social construct that was invented during the colonial era that ultimately served to justify the exploitation of some people. I’m not a scientist, but my reading of the literature is that this is a widely shared consensus view among biologists and geneticists—that there are no biological or genetic races. What happened in race discourse in the late ’80s and the ’90s is that the discredited idea of race as a biological fact was underwritten by the idea of race as a cultural fact. Once one basis for belief in races was discredited, another one rushed in to fill its place, and that was culture. But interestingly, the people who did that were largely progressives. And there’s the rub. Many progressives feared that the attack on the idea of biological races would potentially undermine the basis for things like antidiscrimination law and affirmative action. The fear was that once you don’t have races anymore, how can you
