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A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History
Nicholas Wade
Penguin: 2014.
ISBN: 978-1594204463

Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century
Michael Yudell
Columbia University Press: 2014.
ISBN: 978-0231168748

The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea
Robert Wald Sussman
Harvard University Press: 2014.
ISBN: 978-0674417311


Is race biologically real? A clutch of books published this year argue the question.

All miss the point. Michael Yudell's Race Unmasked and Robert Sussman's The Myth of Race can be read as inadvertent retorts to former New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance, published while the former were in the press. Wade's book is by far the most insidious, but all three are polemics that become mired in proving (in Wade's case) or disproving (in the others') whether race is biological and therefore 'real'. This question is a dead end, a distraction from what is really at stake in this debate: human social equality.

Race is certainly real — ask any African American. It originated long before the science of genetics, as sets of phenotypes...