I’ll take the other side. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging race. Today people equate race with a biological essentialism that was grafted onto it in the

I’ll take the other side. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging race. Today people equate race with a biological essentialism that was grafted onto it in the recent past, but that’s not what race ever meant. Acknowledging race is nothing more than acknowledging that different peoples exist and exhibit group differences. Those differences can generally be readily assessed based on cultural and phenotypical cues without resorting to genotyping. It’s a social construct, but so is all human knowledge. And there are rough edges, but that doesn’t invalidate it. The distinction between “chair” and “table” is also socially constructed and can have rough edges, but that doesn’t render them or “furniture” as a whole useless. I wholeheartedly agree with liberals that indigenous minority groups, and some others with special circumstances, like Blacks in the US, should receive special protections to preserve their identities and safeguard their interests in the face of a situation where they don’t have the numbers to counteract majoritarianism. I also think that the founding people of a nation deserve similar recognition. My father is from an immigrant family. My mother has ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. They have qualitatively different relationships with America on that basis. He comes from an aspirational, urban, working class family, she from a well-established, rural, petit bourgeois family, and they have qualitatively different relationships with America on that basis, too. Solving one problem doesn’t require giving up on the other. A return to the original meaning of tolerance is warranted. Which is learning to cooperate despite differences, not erasing them. And, importantly, it’s a two-way street, not a struggle session in which one side is made to atone perpetually for real or perceived past sins. There’s a point where these differences disappear, but they’re surprisingly durable. Just read Albion’s Seed and you can see how smaller ethnic differences between groups of English colonists are still at work in the political landscape today.