For most of human history, the term “race” didn’t exist. It emerged in the late sixteenth century to describe a type of thing, including a “race of wine,” or a “race of saints.” Before then, every culture on the planet had their own stratification. Europeans considered Asians to be “white.” Even when Enlightenment-era philosophers began categorizing species, they subdivided humans by geographic regions . . . Until white people needed slaves. That’s when, according to professor Gregory Jay, “Whiteness . . . emerged as what we now call a ‘pan-ethnic’ category, as a way of merging a variety of
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