Race is not biologically real, not in the sense that you can tell somebody’s race by testing their blood or measuring their skull. It’s a social construct, like marriage and citizenship: an idea that got mapped onto humans, replacing relationships with identity and then attaching rights to that identity—rights like who could own land and who could be owned. But people don’t stay in tidy racial categories. People get married. People get raped. Skin color becomes an increasingly unreliable way to decide who belongs in which part of the city and in which kinds of work. So race, like marriage and
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