Despite the popular perception that race is “natural” or “timeless,” the biological notion of race is a modern European invention. When race was invented, however, it was invented as “the child of racism, not the father,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, and “the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”442 Whiteness has never existed independent of its location at the top of the racial hierarchy. Thus, as Joel Olson explained in The Abolition of White Democracy, “ ‘White’ or ‘Caucasian’ is not a neutral physical
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