Many people around the world still have implicit bias, and discrimination on the basis of race, unconscious or otherwise, remains stubbornly real. We’re not going to get rid of that bias and discrimination by ignoring it, as John Roberts advocates; we need to take measures to fix the problems of racism, however difficult it might be to figure out what those measures should be.

But the eventual goal of all those measures should be to end the misleading colonialist social construct of race. It should never have been there.

We won’t really be rid of race until we’re rid of racism. Not even just until we’re rid of individual people’s racist biases, but until we’re rid of a social organization where light and dark skin colour are major markers of social power. It’s not just that the biases caused the inequalities, but the other way round. Allport’s sociological theory of contact observed that groups get to know and like each other more when of roughly equal status – but may become more hostile to each other when of different status.

So “abolish race” should not mean “abolish all racial categories right now“. It could not have meant that in King’s day, and I don’t think it should mean that yet either. I’m sympathetic when Amir Zaki of Free Black Thought says “we have to rip off the bandaid sooner or later, and I prefer yesterday” – but I think yesterday is too soon, and so is today.

Some might object that affirmative action or other measures of preferential treatment are not going to help alleviate inequality under the current situation. I’d be sympathetic to that position – but I’m explicitly not going to take a position on it for or against. My argument is about the underlying philosophy rather than the policy details. In the past, when black people had just gotten out of segregation (or were still under it!), preferential treatment was an important and necessary way to even out the lasting effects of the mistreatment they had suffered. The point of that preferential treatment is to get us to a more equal future where it will not be necessary. It is that past and especially that future that I am concerned with. Is the present more like the past that did require preferential treatment, or more like the future that won’t require it? Answering that would require a deep dive into the sociological data, which is not my point. The point is that, whatever the current situation, we have needed preferential treatment before, but we must try to get ourselves to an eventual point where we don’t.

What we do need to do at present, at a minimum, is to keep collecting sociological data by race – that’s part of how we can figure out how long we’d still need preferential treatment. It’s silly to claim that all racial inequality is evidence of racism – if it were, then white children’s having higher rates of leukemia than black children must somehow be caused by anti-white racism. But we do see evidence of implicit bias, of hiring bias, of higher rates of police violence against black people – race does seem to keep making an unjust difference in contemporary American society and likely elsewhere, and we need to be able to use it as a variable in order to explain why.

But the point of doing all of that must always be to get us to a society where race doesn’t matter. And I have come to see that on this point I disagree a great deal with contemporary racial movements – the kind that tell us not to abolish race, even eventually, but to embrace it. Preferential treatment is a way of fighting discrimination with discrimination, the way a vaccine fights disease with disease. That doesn’t mean we should embrace disease.

In my view, preferential treatment is only justified when it is targeted: because the past unjust treatment of this group left its members so far behind, we will take active steps to smooth out the disparity. That’s what affirmative action is supposed to do; it’s what affirmative action does when it works.

But it is not what capitalizing “White” does, when the purpose of such a measure is explicitly described as to “make white people squirm”. It’s not what asking children to divide themselves up – segregate themselves – by racial groups does (as my nephew and niece were asked to do in their schools). It’s certainly not what saying white women shouldn’t wear saris does. I’ve never seen anyone explain how any of these are even supposed to fix the division of humans into unequal races. As far as I can tell, all these measures do is take lives like mine that were largely not raced, and make them raced.

The point of affirmative action, done properly, is to take spaces where race is a major factor and ultimately make it less of a factor. That is to move us in the right direction. But these “embrace race” interventions move us in the opposite direction, the wrong one: they make race a bigger factor in spaces where it wasn’t, without the goal of ultimately making it a smaller factor. They perpetrate the division of human beings into racial categories as a potentially permanent reality. Thus they make race an even bigger problem than it already was. When we say that white people can’t wear dreadlocks and we teach children to divide themselves by race, we create a situation where the best racial situation we can ever hope for is one of – separate but equal.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Human beings have always had gender, so we’re unlikely to get rid of that: every society recognizes a distinction between male and female, even if they make the categories more complicated than just those two (as has been done in far more societies than just the 21st century West). Human beings have also always been suspicious of people from other cultures, sometimes more so if those people look visibly different, and they have typically also placed other groups in hierarchical power categories, like caste. But race qua race was invented with the colonial era, and deserves to die with it and its aftermath.

The Greek and Roman worlds, based around the eastern Mediterranean, mixed heritages from the European, Asian and African continents. They had their stereotypes about people from faraway places, as basically all humans do, but they did not group those stereotypes around supposed biological differences, as the concept of race does. The word “race”, for a group of people who share common ancestry, did not even exist in the English language before the late 16th century. No European author refers to his fellow Europeans as “white people” until 1613.

As far as I can tell, the first to claim systematically that human beings were subdivided into races was François Bernier, in his 1684 “New division of the earth by the species or races that inhabit it.” Well into the time when Europeans had started buying African slaves and bringing them to the Americas, they weren’t yet thinking of those slaves as being part of a distinct race. That would come in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as colonialism extended further around the world with Europeans and their descendants on top.

Unlike gender, race has a beginning. And as the Buddha said, whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation. If race has a beginning, it can have an end. And it should – in due time.