Credit: UMP Press.
In the 21st century, society has grown to rely on the axiom that “race” is a lie. For some people, out of paranoia or a desire to avoid conflict, touting the knowledge that race is socially constructed is a way of declaring that ignorance about what it means is willful.
For the rest of us, knowing that the disparities causing us to live and die in painfully different ways stem from irrational pseudo-science is just an insult piled on top of injuries.
We all deal with the fictions on which white supremacy is founded and the fantasies that aim to rationalize the subordination of everyone else in different ways. Doctors and nurses convince themselves that Black people feel less pain or tolerate it more. White grade-school teachers commend the talents of Black girls and boys at lower rates than their white cohorts.
