The Patriot Post® · No, Mr. President, Race Is Not a Biological Reality

As the days grow shorter and schools prepare to reopen, debates over how students are taught about race, identity, and history are heating up again. In California, San Francisco’s mandatory ethnic-studies program has sparked fierce backlash from parents and conservative groups, who are alarmed at how the curriculum promotes political activism in the classroom. The Eighth Circuit US Court of Appeals, meanwhile, just cleared the way for Arkansas to enforce its ban on critical race theory in public school instruction, part of a growing resistance to teaching children that racism is built into the structure of American life.

I sympathize with efforts to draw a bright line between education and activism. Parents have good reason to confront “woke” indoctrination in their kids’ schools or to be provoked by tendentious racial grievance-mongering disguised as pedagogy.

But the fight over race in education is not confined to the classroom, and the embrace of perverse and offensive narratives is by no means restricted to the progressive left.

In March, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Its declared aim was to eliminate “divisive narratives” about the nation’s past from federal parks, museums, and monuments, and to emphasize instead America’s “unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”

Some of what Trump objects to is indeed troubling. It is appropriate to be concerned about ideological litmus tests, divisive racial essentialism, and the tendency of too many curators to cast the American story as an unrelieved litany of outrage and injustice.

Yet buried in the executive order is a statement so wrongheaded that it should have set off alarms. In a section excoriating the Smithsonian Institution, the document condemns the museum because it “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct” and because it states “Race is a human invention.”

But race is a human invention, not a biological truth. For any educated person to claim otherwise is on par with claiming that diseases can be cured through bloodletting or that astrology is a reliable guide to the future. That the president of the United States would make such a claim in an official statement of policy is appalling.

By now it is a firmly established scientific truth that race has no objective biological existence. The Human Genome Project confirmed in 2003 that the genetic makeup of all human beings is 99.9 percent identical. The vast majority of human genetic diversity, about 85 percent, exists within populations commonly categorized as racial groups. The differences between such groups are so few as to make them genetically indistinguishable.

For all intents and purposes, in other words, the DNA of white people is impossible to differentiate from the DNA of Black people, Asian people, or Native American people. Of course there are physical variations among populations that originated at points far apart on the globe. But the idea that those variations are racial is a relatively recent fiction.

It was not until the late 17th century that the notion that mankind could be sorted into distinct biological races first made its appearance. In an essay classifying human beings by facial characteristics and body type, a French physician and traveler, François Bernier, enumerated four races: Europeans and North Africans, East Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, and the Sami people of the far north. In the generations that followed, numerous other “experts” proposed other racial taxonomies. The German naturalist Johann Blumenbach, for example, counted five human races, Louis Agassiz settled on a hierarchy of eight races, and the anthropologist Joseph Birdsell decided there were no fewer than 32.

Today such taxonomies seem absurd. So does the view, once promoted by Benjamin Franklin, that French and Germans belonged to the “swarthy” race. So does the Census Bureau’s former insistence on enumerating “black” and “mulatto” as separate racial categories and, until 1920, on subdividing “mulattoes” into “quadroons” and “octoroons.”

If the president truly believes that race is a fixed biological reality, he is endorsing a view long discredited by science and rejected by Americans across the political spectrum. “Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life,” asserted Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the NAACP in 1950. “There is no understandable factual basis for classification by race.”

Marshall was speaking as a constitutional lawyer, but modern genetics has confirmed what scientists in the 1950s could only have surmised: Racial categories have no objective biological basis.

That doesn’t mean that race is meaningless, but that its meaning is social, not biological. It is a product of historical, cultural, and political forces. The concept of race was invented to categorize and rank human beings, often for purposes of domination and exclusion. Over time, those categories may have come to feel “natural” or self-evident, but they are anything but. They are constructs, not codes etched in our genes.

It is deeply unsettling to see the White House resurrecting the idea that race is a fixed, objective, biological reality. Such thinking has an ugly pedigree. It undergirded slavery, segregation, and eugenics. It lent scientific respectability to white supremacy. It’s the reason “one-drop” rules existed and why anti-miscegenation laws once barred people from marrying across racial lines. It is not the language of truth and sanity — it is the language of race science and racial hierarchy.

Trump may imagine that he is striking a blow against leftist dogma, but this isn’t a left-vs.-right issue. The point has been underscored across the political spectrum — including by the Supreme Court’s most conservative jurist.

“Race is a social construct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his 2023 concurrence in the landmark case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. “We may each identify as members of particular races for any number of reasons, having to do with our skin color, our heritage, or our cultural identity.” But that doesn’t change reality, he continued. “All racial categories are little more than stereotypes, suggesting that immutable characteristics somehow conclusively determine a person’s ideology, beliefs, and abilities. Of course, that is false.”

Clearly there are some human groupings that are genetically determined and have clear physical and reproductive markers — blood type, biological sex, ancestral haplogroups, eye color. Race, by contrast, has no such definitive foundation. It is a story we tell — sometimes to include, but often to segregate or demean.

That is why the stakes here are so high. A government that treats race as a biological certainty is a government that legitimizes inequality and division. It is not “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” to claim that people’s character, capabilities, or civic status can be inferred from inherited traits. It is doing the opposite. And it opens the door to even more alarming policies. If race is “real” in a biological sense, what follows? Race-based restrictions? Genetic profiling? The lionizing of historical figures with benighted racial views — and the memory-holing of those who opposed them?

The president often casts himself as a fighter against political correctness and progressive overreach. But in this case, he isn’t fighting back — he’s reaching back, to a time when science was bent to serve bigotry. The right answer to racial dogma from the left isn’t racial pseudoscience from the right. It is fidelity to truth, and to the ideal that all men are created equal.