You can say that race doesn't really exist by equivocation. It's not a scientific term any more than "natural" is, but it is a societal distinction of extreme potency. It doesn't do an American black a lot of good to point out that "race is a social construct" as two men point guns at him while a third tosses a rope over a tree branch.

I've said all I care to say about "social constructs" and to continue arguing it would just make for bad blood, but I don't buy it. Find another way to express it and I may unbend a little but that phrase just offends me like crazy. So does "cis."

But what matters is that most bad people see race as a fundamental difference between people and a lot of them nurture murderous hatred over what you say doesn't exist. I leave it to the reader to decide which formulation matters more in daily life.

Jean Piaget developed a stage theory of cognitive development; Lawrence Kohlberg developed a stage theory of moral development (what he learned about humanity led him to take his own life). I have one of my own, for matters of bigotry, which I choose to express in terms of race since that's what this column is about, but it could as well apply to other bigotry. You needn't subscribe to either formulation to track my stages.

As with Piaget's and Kohlberg's, not all people begin lives at the lowest stage and not everyone progressed to the highest one.

1) plain old bigot. White supremacist, thoughtless, believes with complete conviction that one race is superior to the others, that the others are only fit for menial labor and are less than human.

2) woke. There are no races, any suggestion that there are any differences between people is bigotry, trans women are women, everyone has a 100 IQ, social constructs, Asians don't eat any more rice than anyone else, etc. etc. etc. Have a Coke and a smile.

3) biological or societal, there are such things as races again, unscientific, and there are differences between them. These differences are not inferiority or superiority, they just are, and we can accept them without looking down our noses Cultural differences, biological differences, who cares, move on and forget about it, in any metric you care to mention (melanin, intelligence, penis length) there is huge overlap in the bell curves and right now there are more important things to think about.

I have striven all my life to be at (3). I've mostly succeeded.

I don't have to say anything about (1) but I don't have a lot of esteem for (2) either.