Explores the concept of race
The term race, which originally denoted genealogical or class identity, has in the comparatively brief span of 300 years taken on an entirely new meaning. In the wake of the Enlightenment it came to be applied to social groups. This ideological transformation coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were natural, and not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of races as genetically distinct entities. The results of this view were the encoding of race and racial hierarchies in law, literature, and culture.
How racial...