Race seems like such a concrete aspect of our lives. After all, imprints of race are everywhere you look in our culture, from this country’s history of racial segregation to the racism still rife in America today. Questions about race can be found on everything from forms at the doctor’s office to job applications. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks people by different races (despite its own acknowledgment that racial categories don’t actually exist). Even medical research organizes its studies according to race. There’s just one problem: race is an illusion – a construct created from our flawed human perspective. Just as a limited vantage point led humans to erroneously conclude that the sun revolved around the Earth, our eyes fool us into seeing racial differences that don’t actually exist.

What is Race?

In order to establish racial divisions, we must first decide on which physical attributes to base these distinctions upon. Yet this is an arbitrary process that lacks any scientific credibility. Should we base our assessment on height? Body type? Skin color? Blood type? Hair color? Hair type? Eye color? Amount of body hair? Facial features such as jaw or bone structure? Each of these divisions would have just as much validity as the measure we’re using now.

Americans have settled on using skin color in order to classify people by race. Yet as Jared Diamond points out, “There are many different, equally valid procedures for defining races, and those different procedures yield very different classifications. One such procedure would group Italians and Greeks with most African blacks. It would classify Xhosas – the South African ‘black’ group to which President Nelson Mandela belongs – with Swedes rather than Nigerians. Another equally valid procedure would place Swedes with Fulani (a Nigerian ‘black’ group) and not with Italians, who would again be grouped with most other African blacks. Still another procedure would keep Swedes and Italians separate from all African blacks but would throw the Swedes and Italians into the same race as New Guineans and American Indians. Faced with such differing classifications, many anthropologists today conclude that one cannot recognize any human races at all.” (Diamond, 1994)

The most scientific way to classify race would be to use the human genome as your guide. Yet once again, rather than confirming the idea of racial differences, science completely obliterates these stereotypes. “Populations are genetically ‘open,’ meaning that genes flow between them,” write Haviland, Prins, Walrath & McBride. “Because populations are genetically open, no fixed racial groups can exist.” (2005, p. 326) Geneticists note that race differences have little to do with biology, and therefore should not be used in medical science. “Because races are open and gene flow has taken place among them for millennia,” note Thompson & Hickey, “no race has exclusive possession of any gene or genes and there are no ‘pure races.'” (Thompson & Hickey, 2008) In fact, “there are more genetic differences among Africans from different regions of Africa than there are between Africans and Europeans.” (Fox, 2003)

“Genetically, two black people are more likely to be more different to each other than a black person and a white person,” writes Adam Rutherford. “In other words, while the physical differences are clearly visible between a white and a black person, the total amount of difference is much smaller than between two black people.” (Rutherford, 2017) While this might seem counterintuitive at first, the reason is that lighter skin is a more recent genetic development, whereas the human diversifying that happened in Africa occurred over a far longer period. The genes related to skin color are also a minute portion of the overall genome. This means that more of the things that make us alike or different, or which differentiate one human from another, exist separate and apart from skin color.

As a result, there’s more genetic variation between individuals within a group than there is between groups of different populations. (Lewontin, 1972) As James Shreeve states, “most of what separates me genetically from a typical African or Eskimo also separates me from another average American of European ancestry.” (Shreeve, 1994) Line up two white people and a black person side by side, and each of those white people may have more in common genetically to the black person than they do with each other.

“Many African Americans have European ancestors, and many of those who define themselves as ‘white’ have African, Asian, and Native American ancestors,” write Thompson & Hickey (2008, p. 258). Trying to separate us into races is like trying to undo a batch of cookies that’s already been blended and baked and then divide them back into their elemental parts. Humans are even carrying around DNA from entirely different hominid species. Europeans have an average of 2% Neandertal genes, whereas African Americans (whose ancestors never made it that far north) have close to zero (but not quite zero). Melanesians, meanwhile, get up to 5% of their genome from Denisovans, another extinct hominid. (Rutherford, 2017)

Go far back enough and we all become brothers and sisters. “You are of royal descent,” adds Rutherford, “because everyone is. You are of Viking descent, because everyone is. You are of Saracen, Roman, Goth, Hun, Jewish descent, because, well, you get the idea. …If you’re a human being on Earth, you almost certainly have Nefertiti, Confucius, or anyone we can actually name from ancient history in your (family) tree, if they left children. The further back we go, the more the certainty of ancestry increases. …It is simultaneously wonderful, trivial, meaningless, and fun.” (ibid) All 7 billion human beings or so that reside on this planet are really just one great big extended family, and so we shouldn’t be dividing ourselves on the basis of something so trivial as varying shades of skin.