Race is made up #shorts

I have been intrigued by my daughter’s crayon box set called Colors of the World. It features “24 specially formulated colors” that represent human colors, the colors of our hair, our eyes, and our skin. And this got me thinking about how the idea of “race” is completely made up.

For clarity, I'm going off of this definition of "race" from Merriam-Webster:

race: any one of the groups that humans are often divided into based on physical traits regarded as common among people of shared ancestry

It’s a social construct, meaning humans collectively invented it. Specifically, throughout history, socially dominant groups typically created different races to justify them being at the top of the social hierarchy.

While groups of humans have pretty much always classified themselves as DIFFERENT from OTHER groups, it wasn’t until European countries started colonizing the world in the 1500s that the modern concept of “race” became a thing.

But goodness. There isn’t a “race” chromosome in our DNA. There’s no biological basis for it whatsoever. I know this may sound a little...weird...but race was created so that people could be racist, and so when I look at this box of crayons and see “deep almond,” and “light rose” I am reminded of the absurdity of it all.