The Fallacy of Race
Race Is Not Biological. Just Useful.
When Fiction Becomes Fact
Humans share 99.9% of their DNA. Genetically, we are almost identical. That 0.1% is tiny. It has just enough variation to affect skin color, hair texture, and disease resistance. None of it creates a different human species. Yet we've built hierarchies around these tiny variations in skin, hair, and features.
The truth is, race isn't in our DNA.
It's in our imagination.
Race feels real because of the consequences. People are treated differently based on their racial categories (the fallacy), and there are measurable effects (the consequences) like wealth gaps, incarceration rates, health disparities, social segregation, and discrimination. Put objectively, dividing people produces real-life outcomes in society, even though there is no biological cause that justifies it.
In reality, there is no meaningful genetic difference between us. The categories that separate us were invented, defined, and are enforced socially.
So-called "races" don't correspond to any clear biological groups.
For example, if I painted a line down a sidewalk and said, "Only white people can cross." The line is made up. However, if enough people support and enforce the rule, it becomes a reality, and so do its consequences.
The Invention of Race
Race isn't something ancient. While ideas of human difference existed before, the rigid system of hierarchy we know as race was developed in modern colonial America.
Let that sink in.
In 1600s Virginia, the elite deliberately created "whiteness" as a legal class to divide and control the labor force. After events like Bacon's Rebellion, where poor white colonists and enslaved Africans had joined in revolt, the colonial elite moved quickly to divide them. They feared the danger of poor Black and white workers uniting against them. Lawmakers passed laws granting Europeans special privileges while making African slavery permanent and hereditary. This prevented class solidarity, secured cheap labor, and offered poor whites a sense of superiority. A literal "divide and conquer" strategy to maintain their power and entrench a racial caste system.
Though race was engineered in colonial America, the practice didn't stay there. Other empires adapted it to justify conquest and control, making racial categories a tool of power:
The development of racial "science" by European and American thinkers classified humans into hierarchies, claiming whites were biologically superior
The Caste System in Colonial Latin America, imposed by Spanish colonial authorities (white Europeans), used race to define legal rights and privileges based on ancestry
South African Apartheid used race to classify and separate, and grant political, economic, and social dominance over Black South Africans
The Holocaust's Nazi regime used race to define Jewishness biologically, stripping Jews of rights and preparing the groundwork for genocide
"White" was never a natural category. It was socially and legally engineered to do a specific job: to create solidarity among Europeans of different ethnicities—English, Irish, German, Spanish, and Italian. It was used to divide indentured servants from enslaved Africans to prevent class solidarity. Race defined who had access to rights, land ownership, voting, and citizenship.
Today, "white" is still not neutral. It's the unspoken standard our society uses to measure everyone else. Whiteness functions as an invisible norm: rarely named, rarely questioned, and rarely examined. It defines itself as "just normal" while casting other racial identities as marked, "different", or suspect.
Food for thought: When have you heard white people described as the problem? There's no mainstream narrative calling them an "invasion" or an existential threat. That's how racial fear works. It isn't applied equally.
On the other hand, Blackness, Brownness, and Indigeneity become hyper-visible, policed, and stereotyped, while whiteness slips by unchallenged.
A white person can say, "I'm just American" without qualifiers, while others are labeled "Mexican American," "African American," or "Asian American". This reveals "American" is silently coded as "white," while making everyone else marked as different.
This invisibility is its power, because we've learned to accept and hardly question it. It's the norm, but it allows those who benefit from it to see themselves as individuals without "race," while defining everyone by theirs. That unexamined advantage is what we've dubbed white privilege.
None of these systems is "natural" or biological; they're deliberate tools of power normalized over generations until they're accepted and feel like they're common sense.
Debunking Race (Biologically)
The scientific consensus is that there are no distinct "races" biologically. There is 99.9% genetic similarity across all humans. There are more genetic variations within so-called races than between them. Genetically speaking, race isn't real. Skin color is not a meaningful divider. It is pure cultural fiction. Dividing people by skin color makes as much sense as sorting them by freckles or by who's lactose intolerant.
Race only works because we believe in it and build systems around it. Laws once explicitly segregated neighborhoods, and that legacy still exists in zoning and property valuations. Systems that devalue Black and Brown communities. Medical guidelines have used race as a crude stand-in for biology, leading to under-treatment and less access to life-saving care. Refugees and asylum seekers from Latin America, Africa, or the Middle East face more skepticism and harsher policies, while white South Africans and Europeans are admitted with little or no resistance. These aren't accidents. They're relics of a past that built itself on racial categories.
The truth is simple: Race is a lie with real-world teeth. Its danger isn't in its fallacy, but in how we built our world around it. Dividing, segregating, and punishing those deemed "different."
I'll say this again because it bears repeating:
Racial hierarchy isn't something ancient.
It's a modern colonial American invention.
It's a tool of power. A tool designed to create fear, division, and to justify control. Remember, power doesn't need race to be real. It only needs us to believe that it is.
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–Luis