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You may think you know exactly what race you are,

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but how would you prove it 
if someone disagreed with you?

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The fact is, even though race drives 
a lot of social and political outcomes,

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race isn't real.

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One of the first people to attempt 
to categorize humans according to race

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was a German scientist around 1776.

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He came up with 5 different groups

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according to physical appearance 
and geographic origin of their ancestors.

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American's of European descent eagerly bought into 
this type of thinking around the same time.

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Some historians have said the idea 
that there are different races

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helped them resolve the contradiction between 
a natural right to freedom and the fact of slavery.

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If whites were their own distinct category,

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then they could feel a lot better 
about denying freedom to people

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who they labeled black 
and decided were fundamentally different.

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But as political priorities change,

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definitions of race in America 
adjust right along with them.

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For example, if you were of Mexican birth 
or ancestry in the United States in 1929,

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you were considered white.

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Then, the 1930 census changed that 
to non-white to limit immigration.

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Later, when the US needed to increase 
its labor force during World War II,

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these people were switched back to white.

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And what it took to be "black" once varied 
so wildly throughout the country,

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from 1/4, to 1/16, to the infamous 
"One drop" of African ancestry,

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that people could actually change races 
just by crossing state lines.

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Then, suddenly in 2000, the government decided 
that Americans could be more than one race

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and added a multi-racial category to the census.

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This has left many Americans scratching their heads
when it comes to selecting who they are.

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As many as 6.2% of census respondents selected 
"Some other race" in the 2010 survey.

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The idea that someone might look one way, 
and identify another way,

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or that they might be really hard to place 
in a racial category, is not new.

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This is why there was a public debate about

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whether MSNBC's Karen Finney 
could say she was black,

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or how we can't even agree on the racial label 
assigned to the President of the United States.

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Of course many people feel their racial identity 
is very clear and very permanent,

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but the fact that some people have changed theirs, 
and that no one can really argue with them,

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shows how shaky the very idea of race is.

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This is all because there isn't a race chromosome 
in our DNA that people can point to.

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It simply doesn't exist.

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When the medical community 
links race to health outcomes,

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it's really just using race 
as a substitute for other factors,

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such as where your ancestors came from,

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or the experiences of people who may have 
been put in the same racial group as you.

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Dorothy Roberts explains that sickle-cell anemia 
is a prime example of this.

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The disease is linked to areas 
with high rates of malaria,

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which includes some parts of 
Europe and Asia in addition to Africa.

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It's not actually about race at all.

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This of course does not mean that the concept 
of race isn't hugely important in our lives.

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The racial categories to which we're assigned 
can determine real life experiences,

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they can drive political outcomes, and they can 
even make the difference between life and death.

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But understanding that 
racial categories are made up

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can give us an important perspective 
on where racism came from in the first place.