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| A. C. Grayling (b 1949)
on amazon / pdf |
"Almost everywhere one looks among present societies, race and racism make angry welts and deep wounds on the body politic. It is an irony that although racism is a reality, and a harsh one, race itself is a fiction. The concept of race has no genetic or biological basis. All human beings are closely related to one another, and at the same time each human being is unique. Not only is the concept of race entirely artificial, it is new; yet in its short existence it has, like most lies and absurdities current among us, done a mountain of harm. . . . But advances in genetics have demolished such taxonomies, by taking DNA [and species] as the criterion of classification. . . . ‘Race has no basic biological reality,’ says Professor Jonathan Marks of Yale University; ‘the human species simply doesn’t come packaged that way.’ Rather, race is a social, cultural and political concept based on superficial appearances and historical conditions, largely those arising from encounters with other peoples as Europe developed a global reach, with the slavery and colonialism that followed.
. . . The physical diversity of human populations today is purely a function of geographical accidents of climate and the isolation of wandering bands. The distinctions which have since been drawn between peoples are therefore arbitrary and superficial, even those relating to skin colour – for as a moment’s attention shows, there is simply no such thing as ‘white’, ‘black’ or ‘yellow’ people; there are people with many shades and types of skin, making no difference to any other aspect of their humanity save what the malice of others can construct."
~From Sections 68 & 69
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