In this powerful work of non-fiction, G. Phillip Whitaker leads us on a journey through history, reality, and the highly ingrained myths of “race.” With personal experience, historical investigation, and an appeal to reconciliation, The Myth of Race attempts to unravel the fabrications that have come to define human identity and division.

Whitaker takes his own lived experience—growing up in a racially segregated school setting, experiencing the brutal realities of racism as an adult—to investigate the origins and effects of racial classification. He dismantles the dominant myths, beginning with the etymology of the word “human” and its association with color, to the pseudo-scientific assumptions that have long categorized various groups according to skin color and physical characteristics.

The book is a critical analysis of the construction of the term “race” by earlier figures such as Johann Blumenbach and Immanuel Kant, who attempted to classify human beings in terms of random and biased criteria. Whitaker demonstrates how such conceptions, based on aesthetics and intellectual prejudice, have energized systematic divisions and injustice that still dominate societies across the globe.