There was a time not so long ago when race was thought by Christian Western Europeans to constitute a hierarchical chain of life which they called the “Great Chain of Being,” which they believed was created by God, in which the Christian European races were closest to God in perfection. It surprises no one that Thomas Jefferson, clever as he was, believed in the “Chain of Being” theory which put him and other people of his color and ethnicity at the very top of the hierarchical order. In 1784 the future U.S President and likely the father of at least one of the slaves he owned, published Notes on the State of Virginia, a study of Virginia’s natural history as well as of its social and political life. He said, “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind... This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

The etymology of the word race probably comes as a surprise even to most highly educated people. The word race came into the English language around 1580. It came from the Old French rasse which was probably derived from the Arabic Word “ras” meaning the head of someone or something. Used in this way, “ras” points to the root or the head of selected species. Traced back further the concept comes from the Latin gens or Arabic genat meaning clan, stock or people and genus meaning birth, descent, origin, stock, or family... or with Greek genos meaning kind, birth, offspring, stock... This late origin for the English and French term race came into use around the time of Christopher Columbus. During the period we call “The Age of Enlightenment, Europeans tried to define race as a biological concept, in keeping with their scientific ideas. In the centuries that followed, scholars have collected and analyzed data on individuals and populations, yet there is no research data which denote scientifically practical distinctions to justify categorizing human beings into distinct groups to match the Christian Western European concept of race.

Undertaking a journey from the South Pole to the North Pole, there would be no demarcation lines along the way to indicate when one passes through one “racially” distinct group and enters another. There is a gradually lightening of skin coloring of groups of people depending on the distance their long-ago ancestors lived from the region of the equator where humans were more exposed to the skin darkening effects of the sun. Traveling north from the equator one goes from seeing people with very dark skin through places where generally people’s skin color is progressively lighter until the Scandanavian countries are reached where people have very fair skin and generally very blond hair.

No scientific study has shown race to be anything more than a recent human invention, an assignment of meaning to a word. All humans share a common ancestry and, because each of us represents a unique combination of ancestral traits, all humans exhibit biological variation. Historian Robin Kelly says, “Racism is not about how you look; it’s about how people assign meaning to how you look.”

From the beginning, the idea of race was tied to power and hierarchy among people, with one group being viewed as superior and others as inferior. Despite disproving notions of hierarchy and removing social, economic and political barriers, the legacy of race continues to shape the lives and relationships of people in the U.S. and around the world.

What am I going to do now that I know for sure that there is no such thing as a distinct racial category to which I belong? Whenever I am asked to indicate which “race” I belong to, I am going to decline to participate in such nonsense.