Apparently, all of the other crazy ideas being floated out there these days have gotten boring, so some people have been recycling a strange theory that’s been making the rounds for a number of years. The Washington Post ran an article yesterday with the curious title, “Race isn’t real, science says. Advocates want the census to reflect that. A small but vocal group of professionals and academics imagine a future where categories don’t matter.” Psychotherapist Carlos Hoyt dives into the history of this theory and arguments that race both is and isn’t real, whether you’re talking about genetics or social constructs. Supposedly, race is an artificial construct scientifically, but if you claim that there is no racism in the United States or that you are “colorblind,” you will be ostracized by the same people attempting to make this argument. If your head is already spinning from this conversation, you’re not alone. Ann Althouse attempted to dissect the discussion in her blog.

Hoyt read aloud the Census Bureau’s caveats, that ‘the racial categories included in the Census Questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country, and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically.’ He sighed. ‘To recognize that race … is a false concept but to keep doing it anyway, there’s something intellectually problematic about it.’… There’s a principle in psychotherapy that says you don’t take away a client’s defenses unless you have something to replace it with, because it’s serving a purpose, right?’ said Hoyt.”

As I said, this isn’t something entirely new. Nearly a decade ago, the journal Scientific American published a study arguing that racial categories are “weak proxies for genetic diversity” and need to be “phased out.” What they were primarily arguing was that in the field of genetics, variables in the human genome don’t line up perfectly along racial lines and race should be able to be ignored in such studies.

But other advocates seem to be taking the concept much further. They argue that the United States Census shouldn’t even be broken down by race. All of that information is apparently useless. Of course all of these arguments appear to completely ignore some fundamental realities that you really don’t need to be a scientist to grasp.

First of all, at the highest level I would love to agree with these people. Racial differences shouldn’t be such an issue in modern society and having a truly “colorblind” society where everyone is granted the same opportunities and charged with the same responsibilities is something we should aspire to. We obviously haven’t reached that point, but things are much better than they were only half a century ago.

But with that said, it should also be equally obvious that race is definitely “a thing” when it comes to human beings, or at least it used to be. (More on that in a moment.) Humans managed to make their way around much of the globe very early in our development and then settled in as relatively isolated civilizations. Some of our physical characteristics, most notably our skin color, changed in response to the environments in which we lived. And while I’m no geneticist, it seems impossible that at least some of that information isn’t buried away in our DNA, otherwise all babies would just be born with random features.

Further, there are certain medical conditions that are obviously associated with the race of the patient, and that’s valuable information for medical science to keep in mind. The most obvious example is that of the prevalence of sickle cell anemia in Black and Hispanic patients (though it does show up in others far more rarely), but other examples exist.

Of course, race may not be with us in a meaningful way forever. Once humans began travelling and migrating and interbreeding, the differences began to fade. My own 23andMe test results are a testament to that. But those differences are still far from gone, however. For the majority of people, we can pretty much tell at a glance what the majority of their racial makeup probably is. But the more mixing that takes place, the less obvious those differences should become. That’s probably a good thing. But it seems as if we are a very long way from being able to simply declare that “race is a social construct” and it should be abolished from the language.