We’re on the heels of Black History Month, and 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of celebrating the legacies of important historical (and living) Black Americans. It also marks yet another year when shrill voices (including aspirational orange dictators) speak out against and try to suppress this celebration.

“Why do we need a month just for Black history?” they complain, crossing their arms and squinting, wrinkling their noses in disgust. 

And indeed, every Black History Month, this complaint rings over and over. It is a complaint people have about Indigenous History and Women’s History Months, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and Pride Month. These months, during which people and cultures are celebrated, have been promoted in libraries for years. 

Children are educated with an emphasis on the whitewashed history of the United States. They are taught about the Founding Fathers who supposedly created a nation all by themselves. We are taught about Thomas Edison as the genius behind the lightbulb. The emphasis in the education system here is on the history of white men.

And this is, to a great degree, intentional. The racist ideal of white supremacy is just as foundational as “all men are created equal,” a strange dichotomy that makes the U.S. peculiar in many ways. People in other nations say that “everything revolves around race.” White people in the U.S. complain, “Why does it gotta be about race?”

In American education, every day of every month is white man’s history month. So that every year is white man’s history. The stories of white entrepreneurs and political figures are well known. To give other people who are part of American history a voice is to educate everyone on more figures and events that we may not otherwise learn.

And while this conversation may feel tiresome to some, the more interesting question that we often don’t stop to consider is: What is race?

Race as a Philosophical Concept: A History

How do we define race? Basically, it’s division. By definition, it’s the separation of people into smaller groups based on inherited traits, biological and physical. These inherited characteristics are unique to the people classified as a race, and they are generally from the same area of the world.

What we know as race is a modern concept, and can be traced, in part, to 15th century Spain. Get ready, because this is about to be A LOT.

The Spanish and Portuguese were the first in Europe to use the labor of enslaved African people. The enslavement of Africans gained traction, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade expanded. Enslaved people looked different and shared different cultural traditions. For Enlightenment period thinkers like René Descartes, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, among others, equality is central. But how do you reckon egalitarianism while enslaving human beings and treating them as property? 

Francois Bernier (1625-1688) decided he’s just got to talk about this. A Frenchman and well-traveled man, he created a taxonomy of human beings. (Kinda similar to the way Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) pioneered the taxonomy of organisms.) Bernier wrote a book, in which he separated the people he has seen into categories, based on where they live and physical traits. Here we find one of the foundational theories of race.

Essential to these early arguments, and heading into the 19th century are two theories of race: monogenesis and polygenesis. Monogenesis posits that people of color come from the same source as the white people, as in the Bible. In the Book of Genesis, we all stem from Adam and Eve with a single genealogy for everyone. Polygenesis fans claim that people other than European white people stem from different ancestries. This is all centered around the assumption that white people are superior to people of color.

Other Europeans jumped on this bandwagon, thinking it’s a great, fun way to categorize people, especially if the people who are like them come out on top. You get David Hume (1711-1776) taking it a step farther. To him, Africans were obviously and naturally inferior. Kant jumped on the bandwagon too. People of color are not from a different stock (polygenesis), he argued, but for all the wrong reasons. They are not another species (like animals) because they can have children with white people. Let that sink in.

By the time Kant was writing, slaver ships were more rapidly transporting enslaved Africans to the Americas to meet increasing demands for free labor. Africans were crammed into the bellies of ships like cargo. They were shipped and then auctioned off like cattle to spend the rest of their lives brutalized by some asshole or another, away from their homes and families, in a system so cruel it requires its own trigger warning.

The hypocrisy of Enlightenment ideals fueled the French and American Revolutions—despite the enslavement of 12.5 million Africans. And it requires intellectual gymnastics for slavery and white supremacy apologists.

Racist Ideas and Pseudoscience

In the 19th century, these apologists turned from the earlier, more religious arguments for race. This mindset was outdated, they thought. As abolition became more widespread, the English and French colonialists, the biggest enslavers of Africans in the world, needed to justify why it’s totally OK to continue (and grow!) a cruel system. 

Some of slavery’s proponents used the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) that riffed on Bernier. But Blumenbach did stuff like measuring the skulls of people to argue humans are distinct, and different races look scientific because he did some “research.” 

There were some other prominent white guys who decided that this was an awesome idea, that there is physical and therefore scientifically verifiable evidence that race is a thing and that white people are the best. This birthed pseudosciences phrenology and physiognomy that do a whole lot of nothing to prove that white people are supreme in every way, especially scientifically.

These ideas continued well into the 19th century, as the huckster Blumenbach tried to sell the snake oil of white supremacy in an attempt to keep free labor plentiful. If enslaved Africans are inferior to their white enslavers, then it’s easier to argue to keep them enslaved. This is what the argument for white supremacy then boiled down to. Enslavers were hugely profiting off the backs of their oppressed in an economy driven by agriculture that required back-breaking manual labor. When you think about it, the origins of white supremacy are disturbingly capitalistic.

The Civil War abolished slavery, and left salty white supremacists in need of new ways to prove their superiority and oppress newly freed Black Americans. Enter eugenics.

Another supposedly scientific concept, eugenics, theorized that you can use Darwin’s evolution in human beings to make “better” quality humans. Certain undesirable qualities should be bred out to make superior humans for posterity. You can see where this is going. Francis Galton (1822-1911) really wanted eugenics to become codified into law so that people could “choose” their kids. In the United States that allowed the forced sterilizations of “undesirable” people.

A photo I took in 2024 at the Tubman African American Museum, in Macon, Georgia. Depicted is one of the iconic posters held by Black sanitation union workers in Tennessee during a strike.

Deconstructing Race: Postcolonialism, Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter

Theories of race came out of Europe from a group of people who liked to categorize things and liked to place themselves at the top. It gained popularity in the Western world because it helped perpetuate violence and power structures that kept people of color under the boot worn by white supremacy, so it could retain power.

Race began as a social construct because it was convenient for those who controlled the conversation to use it for the widespread dominance of their own cultures. The legacy of the British Empire’s colonization in India, Africa, and the East Indies lingers today. It’s a lot easier to justify taking someone’s land, home, and family if you tell yourself they are subhuman.

Intellectuals have been working to deconstruct these fetid ideologies to stamp out harmful narratives. In academia, theorists Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) and Edward Said (1935-2003) wrote extensively on the aftermath of European colonization in its former colonies.

Critical Race Theory, conservatives’ political football, discusses race in terms of power structures, studying them in ways similar to Michel Foucault’s study of power in Discipline and Punish (which we’ve discussed before). To better understand the underlying motivations for systemic inequality faced by Black Americans, CRT offers some of the intellectual building blocks needed to deconstruct them. Sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) and more modern theorists Kimberlé Crenshaw (b. 1959) and Cornel West (b. 1953) have contributed to this school of study.

When an aspiring autocrat posts an AI-generated video of the first Black president and First Lady as primates, racism and white supremacy are the conversation. Outside the U.S., and through the eyes of many within, this can be difficult to understand. Why do we still care about race? Didn’t they stop that with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?

The Black Lives Matter movement offers some clarity. The name, controversial in and of itself, is a reminder that Black lives are valuable and deserving of the same protections afforded to the dominant white culture. The social justice movement galvanized a framework (albeit hard to find after 2020) to shout down anti-Black police brutality, the criminalization of Black people, and the prison industrial complex chomping at the bit to profit.

For Black Americans today, the racism inherent in antiquated and hateful theories never ended, despite thinly veiled freedoms offered by the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction. It didn’t stop with MLK’s Dream. It didn’t stop with Black Lives Matter. And it won’t stop until we, as a society, make the choice to confront the ugly truth, and end it.

A Note and Reading List

Additional editing done by Dana Amihere.

I would like to note here that this is by no means an exhaustive discussion of race as a theory in philosophy. Unfortunately, I only have so much space to write an article and you only have so much room in your eyes to read it. I write through an American lens, and write that with which I am very familiar. I also write as someone who is white, so there are certain limitations in my understanding. This is why I would like to offer you a reading list, should the topic of race (especially race in America) interest you. These authors do a much better job of tackling this topic than I do.

A Selected Reading List

The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah Jones

Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Ibram X. Kendi (there is also a graphic novel adaptation of this book that is very good and accessible)

Why We Can’t Wait by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.