Am I Racist? part 2

The linguistic origins of a question not worth asking

In part one of this essay, which hopes to explain how the question “Am I racist?” is, largely speaking, an unnecessary one, I observed that those people who believe in racial inferiority / superiority already acknowledge their own racism and would not therefore have a need to ask the question — though they may not take kindly to the designation itself, which has become fraught over time, given the way “race” has been used culturally and historically, mostly without the benefit of scientific rigor. The scientific idea that there are quantitative group differences in things like average cognition scores between races, for instance — hereditary genetics — differs from “racial” studies in that the conclusions it draws don’t adhere to “racial” designations in their broad and largely misleading popular iterations. “Race” as a category is a relatively recent construction, after all, and the broad designations we use to label the “races” are undercut by more refined and specific genetic data, in which “racial” data is subdivided and separated.