Sorry to assail your tower of ‘fluency’ but as I said my degree is in History: 20th Century History with a 3rd-4th year focus on World War Two and Middle Eastern diplomacy (or lack thereof). I know how to read data.

I also taught Social Studies 11 and History 12 at the high school level to a cosmopolitan group of Canadian students: never had a complaint and I insisted on critical thinking.

You are implying that anyone who may disagree with you is not just non-factual but in a minority, as if that is argument, even though I provide you with many ‘facts’, both contemporary and historical, which refute part of your otherwise excellent thesis: there is no such thing as race.

If you are talking about how ‘white’ empires, predominantly European, chose to use scientific theories like Darwin’s Origin of Species or religious tenets/interpretations as found in Genesis, like Black skin is the mark of Cain, to further their racist beliefs, then of course we’d be on the same page: the White Man’s Burden being just such an example of 18–20th Century racism.

The religious inspired if not more economically motivated KKK are perhaps the worst example of racism in the past 144 +plus years in North America (the KKK had chapters in Canada too). And that’s not even getting into how Canada and the US treated their Indigenous peoples.

But if you are positing that only white people and only white empires used bigoted beliefs to strengthen their culture, be they religiously inspired, pseudo-scientifically or economically determined, then that is where we differ.

One of the basic tenets of all competing cultures is the degradation of the ‘others’ be they of different ethnicity or language or economic power to ensure a sense of collective belonging and ascendency.

It’s tribal and of course it happened, and is happening, in the US, most recently with Trump’s race-baiting tweets.

But by reinforcing a mistaken belief that only white people are guilty of racism, codifying and then inclucating it, even in the face of vast tomes of contemporary, historical and anthropological data which purport the exact opposite, is in itself bigoted and will not bring ‘white‘ people, all of them presumably guilty due to their level of melanin, to the cultural discussion table.

And surely you think all people should be equally welcome to the ‘get-rid-of-racism’ discussion table, right?

Lastly, I am not trying to belong to some group which is trying to change your mind, as I said, your article is really important reading…on the contrary, I am asking you to look past a cultural bias and dig into empirical data for as most serious academics will tell you, absolutism in any discipline degrades scholastic integrity.