False categories, especially those that have acquired moral prestige, institutional protection, and administrative usefulness, are hard to get rid of. “Race” is such a false category when talking about human beings. Not merely is it a morally compromised word inherited from slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, eugenics, and Nazism; it is a scientifically collapsed and debunked category that nevertheless continues to organize public language as though the collapse had never occurred.
White supremacists and Aryan/Nazi supremacists once built their politics on racial mythology. That much is obvious. But contemporary discourse, including much of what calls itself anti-racist, keeps “race” alive as an organizing concept. It repeats the now-standard disclaimer that race is not biological, then proceeds to speak, classify, moralize, accuse, reward, punish, and administer as though race were the central fact of social existence. This is not liberation from race-thinking. It is race-thinking after race science.
Let us call this what it is: racialism language.
By racialism language I mean the continued use of “race” and racial categories as if they named stable human subdivisions, even when accompanied by the ritual phrase “socially constructed.” It is a language that denies biology in one sentence and restores race as social ontology in the next—unreal in science, real enough for politics, identity, bureaucratic allocation, and institutional control. It is toxic not because it notices discrimination, but because it preserves the classificatory machinery that made racial discrimination possible in the first place.
The scientific point is no longer seriously contestable. Human biological variation exists, but it does not divide humanity into the racial boxes inherited from colonial rule, plantation slavery, segregation, eugenics, and fascist law. Biological anthropologists, geneticists, and the National Academies have repeatedly made the same point: “race” is not a sound proxy for human genetic variation. Human differences exist, but they do not conform to the old racial mythology.
That should have changed public discourse more radically than it did. If a category has no defensible scientific foundation, serious intellectuals should not make it the master noun of social analysis. They may study the history of the category, the harms caused by belief in it, the institutions that imposed it. But they should not continue to treat the category itself as though it were intellectually purified once the adjective “social” is attached to it.
The usual escape hatch is the phrase “race is socially constructed.” This formula has become a kind of passkey. It allows writers, activists, professors, administrators, and consultants to admit that race is not biological while continuing to organize their argument around race. Critical Race Theory uses this move habitually: it says, usually near the beginning, that race is not an objective biological reality but a social construction. Very well. But then what?
Too often, what follows is not the abandonment of race as a category of thought but its resurrection. Race is declared biologically dead and socially immortal. It is rejected as nature but revived as structure; dismissed as genetics but restored as identity; denied as taxonomy but retained as destiny. This is not an intellectual solution. It is category laundering.
Critical Race Theory’s central failure is not that it speaks about discrimination—discrimination must be confronted. Its failure is that it cannot speak about discrimination without preserving race as the master category. Its characteristic move is ontologically evasive and epistemologically disingenuous: first the disclaimer, then the reification. The theory says race is not real in the old biological sense, but then proceeds as if race were real enough to organize knowledge, voice, guilt, innocence, group interest, social standing, institutional legitimacy, and political remedy.
A false ontology does not become sound merely because it is placed in the service of advocacy, nor does political usefulness confer scientific dignity. Witchcraft accusations had real consequences. Heresy trials had real consequences. Caste classifications have real consequences. Jim Crow had real consequences. Nazi racial law had real consequences. But real consequences do not validate the ontology behind them. The fact that institutions can make a falsehood powerful does not make the falsehood true.
That is the missing distinction. “Race” is not real as a human subdivision. Racialization is real as a social process. Racism is real as belief, practice, and institution. Discrimination is real as unequal treatment, exclusion, exploitation, stigma, threat, and humiliation. But “race” itself remains a bad category. A serious theory should study race-making, not race; racialization, not racial identity; discrimination mechanisms, not inherited boxes.
This distinction was drawn, forcefully, well before “woke” entered the political vocabulary and years before DEI became an administrative regime. In 2012, Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields’ Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life showed that race is the product of racism, not its cause—that race exists only in the practice of racial ascription, much as witches exist only in the practice of witch-hunting. The analogy, notably, is the same one used above. The warning was available a decade before the DEI apparatus was built. It went unheeded—or worse, it was absorbed into the very racialism language it had diagnosed.
The woke movement, especially in its university, corporate, philanthropic, and administrative form, ignored this distinction anyway. It took the language of Critical Race Theory, simplified it, moralized it, and bureaucratized it into DEI administration. A legal-academic theory became a compliance regime: training, metrics, hiring language, promotion expectations, diversity statements, speech codes, grievance procedures, ideological surveillance.
The word “woke” has been overused, abused, and weaponized. But the phenomenon it names is real enough: a moral-political style that treats disagreement as harm, skepticism as complicity, speech as violence, institutional neutrality as oppression, and group classification as enlightenment. Wokishness is not simply compassion for the mistreated. It is compassion captured by bad theory, moral vanity, and administrative power. In its DEI form, it often became less a search for fairness than a demand for alignment.
This is why so many DEI regimes produced backlash. Some current efforts to curtail DEI may be debatable in method, scope, or legal theory, but the backlash did not come from nowhere. DEI overreached: it confused moral aspiration with administrative entitlement, replaced inquiry with training, argument with confession, disagreement with accusation, and merit with performative compliance. It made the fight against discrimination look indistinguishable from thought control.
The irony is severe. A movement that claimed to fight discrimination helped normalize new forms of discriminatory sorting. A theory that claimed to expose race as a social construct helped preserve race as the master category of institutional life. A bureaucracy that claimed to foster inclusion often produced suspicion, resentment, silence, and fear—damaging not only the individuals caught in its machinery, but the cause it claimed to serve.
No durable anti-discrimination order can be built on false premises. Good intentions are not enough. The path to hell is often paved not by cruelty alone, but by benevolent ambition joined to bad concepts, little foresight, and the intoxicating belief that one’s own coercion is morally different from everyone else’s.
There is one boundary that must never be crossed: the fight against discrimination must not become a fight against the First Amendment. A free society cannot promise liberty, dignity, and equal citizenship while placing speech, thought, inquiry, and dissent under administrative guardianship. The right to speak freely is not reserved for the enlightened, the credentialed, the fashionable, or the morally approved. It belongs also to the mistaken, the clumsy, the offensive, and the unenlightened. That is not a defect of the First Amendment. It is its point.
This is the hard discipline of freedom. In a free society we must tolerate that some of our brothers and sisters are wrong, prejudiced, crude, historically ignorant, or morally behind the curve. We may answer them, refute their premises, and expose their errors—but we may not strip them of expressive rights merely because their speech is unwelcome or insufficiently enlightened. Fighting discrimination is difficult by design: it requires distinguishing discriminatory conduct, which may properly be prohibited, from offensive opinion, which must remain protected, and it requires institutions to punish harassment, threats, and unequal treatment when proven while refusing to police lawful belief, dissent, or tone.
That tension between dignity and liberty cannot be abolished without abolishing liberty itself. A society serious about human dignity must oppose discrimination; a society serious about freedom must protect the right of people to say things that are wrong, crude, offensive, or unfashionable. The two commitments will rub against each other. They must be managed, not resolved.
The last thing to be surrendered in the struggle against discrimination is the First Amendment. Once speech is placed under ideological supervision, every cause can become an orthodoxy, every orthodoxy an accusation system, and every accusation system a machinery of fear. That is not justice. It is liberalism committing suicide in the language of virtue. The First Amendment is not a luxury to be enjoyed after moral consensus has been achieved; it is the condition that allows a plural society to live without enforced consensus.
The problem becomes even clearer when one considers the departmentalization of discrimination. Contemporary discourse tends to carve human injury into separate administrative silos: race, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, age, caste, class, nationality, ethnicity, language, and so forth. Each silo develops its own vocabulary, moral hierarchy, academic literature, advocacy apparatus, bureaucratic constituency, and preferred rituals of accusation. Intersectionality tries to reconnect the silos, but often does so merely by multiplying categories rather than by questioning the deeper logic of categorization itself.
A friend once posed the matter with a joke that is more philosophically serious than it first appears: which discrimination should one focus on if the person in question is a lesbian, Jewish, dark-skinned woman of older age? The answer should be: all of the above. And if the answer is all of the above, the theory must be general enough to explain all of the above.
That is why we need a General Theory of Discrimination—one that abandons the inherited racial boxes to study the universal mechanisms by which human beings convert perceived difference into unequal treatment: categorization, essentialization, boundary-making, hierarchy, opportunity hoarding, scapegoating, exclusion, institutionalization, and moral rationalization.
History supplies the justification, not merely the illustration. The gravest catastrophes of modernity did not arise from private prejudice; they arose when false categories were codified into law. Jim Crow did not simply dislike Black Americans—it classified, separated, subordinated, and policed them. Nazi racial law did not merely hate Jews—it defined them, registered them, excluded them, and helped prepare their destruction; its architects studied American anti-miscegenation and citizenship law directly when drafting the Nuremberg statutes. Real-world consequences do not validate a false ontology. They are evidence of what a false ontology can do once it acquires the force of law—which is exactly why a general theory, and not a racial one, is needed to guard against its recurrence.
The lesson is not that contemporary DEI is Nazism. That would be absurd. The lesson is more basic and more urgent: beware of any politics that makes inherited or assigned group categories central to moral and civic life. Beware of any regime that classifies persons first and judges them second. Beware of any language that claims to overcome discrimination while preserving the categories by which discrimination learned to speak.
Such a theory would also be more humane. It would return the individual to the center of moral attention without denying institutional patterns. It would recognize that discrimination can be personal or systemic, intentional or unintentional, legal or informal, violent or polite, direct or hidden. It would understand that human beings can be harmed under many descriptions and that no single category has a monopoly on suffering. It would make room for history without imprisoning persons inside inherited taxonomies.
Above all, a General Theory of Discrimination would refuse the moral laziness of racialism language. It would not say “race explains.” It would ask what precisely explains: phenotype, ancestry, class, geography, law, culture, religion, language, migration history, schooling, wealth, family structure, policing, neighborhood, credentialing, stereotype, or institutional rule. It would insist on conceptual precision, because sloppy categories are not harmless. They become forms, rubrics, trainings, accusations, exclusions, and punishments.
The better path is harder. It demands patience, precision, and courage. It requires us to fight discrimination without reifying false categories, to remember history without being governed by its worst language, and to protect vulnerable persons without infantilizing them. Enduring that discipline is a mark of a functioning constitutional order, not a concession to those who abuse its freedoms.
We should retire racialism language. We should study race-making without speaking as if races exist. We should confront racism without reifying race. We should fight antisemitism, anti-Black discrimination, anti-Asian discrimination, anti-Muslim discrimination, misogyny, homophobia, ageism, caste prejudice, disability discrimination, class contempt, and every other form of unjust exclusion under one larger moral and analytical frame.
The goal is not silence about discrimination. The goal is clarity. The goal is not color-blind indifference. The goal is category-conscious deconstruction without category worship. A civilized society should not need racial mythology to fight injustice. It should need courage, evidence, fairness, law, memory, mercy, free speech, and truth.
And truth begins here: race is not a human reality. It rather is a grave human error of wrong term usage that in turn has helped create a terrible history. We should stop rebuilding our institutions around it.