Chapter 1

Race, Anti-racism, and Neoracism

For most of my life, I saw my mother as neither black nor white. Her Puerto Rican father was darker-skinned than me and her Puerto Rican mother was as light-skinned as any white American I knew. My mother emerged a perfect blend of the two: a light-brown hue that suggested neither blackness nor whiteness—at least not to my mind. Nor did I view her as “Hispanic,” a word she hated due to its association with Spanish conquest, or even as “Latina”—though she would certainly have checked that box on a census.

She would sometimes describe herself as “of color.” But whenever she really cared to show her identity, she would say she was Puerto Rican, and more specifically NewYorican—a person who grew up in one of the Puerto Rican enclaves of New York City. Just as important, she would say that she was from the Bronx, and more specifically the South Bronx. Had you asked me what “race” my mother belonged to as a child or adolescent, that would have been my long-winded answer: she was a Puerto Rican/NewYorican from the South Bronx. The words “black” and “white” would not have even occurred to me.

My mother died of cancer when I was eighteen. In the wake of her passing, I took every opportunity to talk about her with anyone who remembered her. I was surprised one time to hear a friend of mine describe her simply as “a black woman.” “You saw my mom as black?” I asked him. “Well, sure. She was, wasn’t she?” I had never considered that the outside world might have perceived her differently. In the case of my friend, I wrote this off as a misperception born of not knowing her very well.

So it came as an even greater shock when my father, who knew her as well as anyone, agreed with my friend. “Your mother was a black woman,” he told me years after she died. I was shocked. I had never seen her as black and I never heard her describe herself that way. I had seen her as an immigrant outside the American black-white binary. Yet many people saw her simply as a light-skinned black American woman.

I am tempted to insist that my memory of her identity is accurate, and that others’ perceptions of her are simply mistaken. But what would it even mean for their perceptions to be “mistaken”? What does it mean to belong to one race or another? Is it a matter of scientific fact, self-identification, perception by others, cultural background, or arbitrary social convention?

What Is Race?

I’ve been using the word “race” without defining it. Indeed, most of us use it all the time without thinking about what it is. Yet we are constantly arguing about it. For a moment, forget that you ever learned the word “race.” Let’s begin at the most basic level.

The Concept of Race

We humans use concepts to make sense of the world. Some concepts are natural and others are socially constructed.

In science, for instance, our goal is to describe nature. So we develop concepts and categories that map onto nature as closely as possible, such as the concept of a tree or the concept of mass in physics. These are natural concepts—concepts that map onto nature with great precision. If for some reason these concepts disappeared from our minds, we’d be forced by logic and our senses to reinvent them in much the same way. Natural concepts carve reality at the joints.

Other times, our goal is not to describe nature but to create a desirable outcome in society. For example, if we’re trying to count time, we may invent the concept of a week—a unit of time that’s equal to the sun rising and setting seven times—so that everyone can be on the same page about when to do things.

The seven-day week doesn’t exist in nature. We could’ve decided that a week equals six days or eight days. Or we could have no weeks at all—counting time only by days. We invented the concept of a week to achieve an important goal: ease of coordination with others. And if our minds were suddenly wiped clean of the concept of a week, we might not reinvent it in exactly the same way. This concept, in other words, is a social construct.

The concept of race falls into a third category. It’s neither completely natural nor completely socially constructed. It’s a social construct inspired by a natural phenomenon.

To take a simple example, consider the concept of a month. Months don’t exist in nature; they don’t track anything in the natural world. Nothing in the cosmos begins when February does or ends when March does. We could just as easily end March a day later and give April an extra day. Or we could get rid of March altogether and distribute its days among the remaining eleven months.

On the other hand, months are clearly inspired by something that does exist in nature: the lunar cycle. It is no accident that months are similar in length to the lunar cycle, which averages 29.5 days. (The words “moon” and “month” even derive from the same root.) So what is a month? It’s not a natural phenomenon because it doesn’t track anything in the natural world with precision. Therefore, it must be a social construct. Yet unlike most social constructs, it owes its very existence and basic characteristics to a natural phenomenon. It is thus a kind of hybrid: a social construct inspired by a natural phenomenon.

The concept of race is similar to the concept of a month. It too is a social construct inspired by a natural phenomenon. What natural phenomenon is the concept of race inspired by?

Tens of thousands of years ago, several large populations of humans migrated out of Africa, where all humans first evolved (Africans, of course, remained in Africa). Once out of Africa, these populations remained isolated from one another—separated by mountains, oceans, or great distances. As a result of living and reproducing in unique environments for tens of thousands of years, each group’s gene pool evolved in response to the unique selection pressures of its environment.

The legacy of these genetic differences is still visible and measurable today. Although each of us is genetically unique (barring identical twins), each of us also belongs to clusters of similar genomes whose similarity stems from the major out-of-Africa migrations that occurred tens of thousands of years ago. These clusters are not sharply separated from one another. They overlap a great deal, and therefore the boundaries between them are blurry. Using standard statistical tools, the strength of these genome clusters can be measured. The visible correlates of these genetically similar clusters are the underlying natural phenomena that inspired the concept of race. (See Appendix A for more details.)

But as with the concept of a month, the social construct has been untethered from the natural phenomenon that inspired it. If tomorrow astronomers discovered that the lunar cycle was really 35 days instead of 29.5, that discovery would have no bearing at all on the length of a calendar month. Likewise, whatever population…