There's a lot of reasons for this resistance to let go of race. And one reason is that societies like ours are built on great wealth disparity, and you need an exploited class for that. George Lipsett calls it a possessive investment in whiteness. You can see it in the stakes involved in people's neighborhoods and their schools.
Scientists weren’t the first to divide humanity along racial – and and racist – lines. But for hundreds of years, racial scientists claimed to provide proof for those racist hierarchies – and some still do.
Resources for this episode:
Fatal Invention, by Dorothy Roberts
The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter