The traits that other people interpret as race do indeed lie within a person’s DNA. Those traits, skin color, hair color and texture, facial features, are all dictated by codes in an individual’s DNA, though we understand little about how those codes work. The race fallacy that plagues our society is the assumption that the codes determining these factors of appearance are linked up to other traits in some known and significant way.

Culture can have large effects on personal behaviors and skills, effects that bury supposed “race” differences, and here are many studies showing how some people with “white” skin can have more in common genetically with people of dark “black” skin than they do with other “white” people.

Our preoccupation with race, our assumptions about the supposed traits that skin color and genetic heritage convey are one of these cultural effects. This preoccupation ignores the effects of culture on the individual, ignores the fact that a white skinned person raised in a hunter/gatherer society in Africa will have skills and abilities that a black skinned person raised in America might never master, just as a black skinned person raised in an highly and conventionally educated U.S. family will have skills and abilities that can be difficult if not impossible for the child of a poor working class family of any “race” to master.