Summary

DiAngelo writes that we have been brought up to think of race as biological fact, while the truth is that there is no scientific truth to this idea. Instead, social and economic forces were behind the organization of society into different races. The U.S. was founded on the ideas of freedom, but it was also a place in which Indigenous people were killed in a genocide and African people were abducted from their homelands and enslaved. Jefferson himself sought to find a scientific basis for the differences among races, though in reality, there were social and economic motivations behind racism. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, "But race is the child of racism, not the father" (10). In other words, racist ideas gave rise to the idea that there were different races. By believing that Black people are inferior, American society can justify its cruelty. By...