COVID-19 AND "RACE"

Coronavirus (Covid-19) needs to be compared to prior global pandemics for us to gain a better, contextual appreciation of its potency, urgency, lethality, virility in our history. "Race," like coronavirus, is as pernicious as any ever to befall mankind. Race is real, but race is not genetic, though race is also a global pandemic, like Covid-19. Rather than being intrinsically biological, "race" is a vexatiously evil, sociopolitical, pseudo-scientific, quasi-forensic mythology, as is superbly explained by this article. “As a professor of biological anthropology, I teach and advise college undergraduates. While my students are aware of inequalities in the life experiences of different socially delineated racial groups, most of them also think that biological “races” are real things. Indeed, more than half of Americans still believe that their racial identity is “determined by information contained in their DNA.” For the longest time, Europeans thought that the sun revolved around the Earth. Their culturally attuned eyes saw this as obvious and unquestionably true. Just as astronomers now know that’s not true, nearly all population geneticists know that dividing people into races neither explains nor describes human genetic variation. Yet this idea of race-as-genetics will not die. For decades, it has been exposed to the sunlight of facts, but, like a vampire, it continues to suck blood—not only surviving but causing harm in how it can twist science to support racist ideologies. With apologies for the grisly metaphor, it is time to put a wooden stake through the heart of race-as-genetics. Doing so will make for better science and a fairer society.” https://www.sapiens.org/body/is-race-real/?fbclid=IwAR3yIdaIubtZ8gM9WyzoKsuyN4Heyy39ZMsEcZ8yK-hiHq46fuHErVVah0s