Sublime

racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted, and that the place of racism in imperial ideology has now been replaced by ‘culturism’. There is no such word, but

But so much of what we think and feel about people of other races is dictated by our system, and not our hearts. Who we see as successful, who has access to that success, who we see as scary, what traits we value in society, who we see as “smart” and “beautiful”—these perceptions are determined by our proximity to the cultural values of the

The racializing serves the core mandate of race: to create hierarchies of value.

ideas argue that racist policies are the cause

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist

The universally lauded Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a full-frontal assault on the implicit idea that biology plays virtually no role in social issues and norms. Nicholas Wade, at the time a New York Times science writer, wrote A Troublesome Inheritance about “Genes, Race and Human History.”