What would you think if a Fortune 500 Corporation Human Resources Director walked up to a podium and announced the following to a big crowd: "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard by which all other groups of are compared.”

Say what?

Assume further that this HR Director then announced that the following are the “common characteristics of most U.S. White people most of the time”:

• White people are self-reliant;
• White people are independent and they highly value autonomy;
• White people use the Scientific Method, with objective rational linear thinking, cause-and-effect relationship and quantitative emphasis;
• White people delay gratification and follow rigid time schedules.
• White people believe the ideal social unit is the nuclear family of father, mother and 2.3 children;
• The children of white people have their own rooms and they are independent;
• White people believe hard work is the key to their success and they believe “work before play”;
• White people plan for the future by delaying gratification and they follow rigid time schedules.

Upon hearing this list, you would strongly suspect that you were listening to a white supremacist or that you had unwittingly stepped into a time warp that threw you back 200 years. Upon reminding yourself that this is actually the year 2020, you would conclude that this big corporation should be sued out of existence based on civil rights violations for creating a hostile work environment for its Black employees.

Unfortunately the source of these words and ideas is a webpage of the National Museum of African American History & Culture, a Smithsonian museum supported by U.S. taxpayers. Here is separate image of the “Whiteness” infographic. 

How does one even begin to articulate the many problems with these ideas?  How should concerned people respond when false information is being used to divide us. What is the solution when a public museum dedicated to African American history mocks the words of Martin Luther King?

I write this article fully acknowledges that racist conduct can still be found in many places in 2020 and that this bigotry should be dealt with aggressively through civil rights laws and social condemnation. We must condemn all real instances of racism, but we must simultaneously question the foundational concept of "race" from which the possibility or racism sprouts.  In short, anyone who wants to eviscerate racism needs to fight a two-front war. NMAAHC's "Whiteness" page doubly fails to fight this two-front war on racism.

Advocating that we should treat people differently based on skin color (as NMAAHC is enthusiastically doing) is throwing gasoline on our racial fires. The "Whiteness" page is stunningly divisive and it is factually unhinged. I would no more expect NMAAHC to be teaching us to be racist than I would expect the American Museum of Natural History to be teaching us that the earth was created 6,000 years ago and that modern humans co-habited our planet with the dinosaurs.

It is demonstrably false that people are born color-coded such that others can determine their personalities, habits and skills by noticing their skin color. That's because immutable traits of individuals, such as skin color, do not determine personality, resilience, aesthetics, capacity for empathy, intelligence, aspirations, parenting skills or any of the other human traits discussed on the NMAAHC "Whiteness" webpage. Skin color doesn't  dictate content of character any more than the many other things over which we have no control, things such as eye color, hair color, whether we have six toes, our birth date or the types of bumps we have on our heads. Constricting the way we evaluate people by using an Overton Window of black versus white  uses the exact same flawed approach used by astrology and phrenology, which also proclaim content of character by reference to equally irrelevant observations.

Many of the human traits listed on the museum’s website ("work before play" and "rational thinking") are demonstrably not true of many “white” people. Many of these same traits are compellingly true of (and embraced as valuable by) many successful Blacks.

NMAAHC's suggestion that we bifurcate people into "white" and "black" is based on an enormous falsehood. There is no meaningful way to distinguish who is white and who is black, because we are all varying degrees of brown, we are all from Africa (and see here) and we are all interrelated.Trying to determine who is more closely related to whom by physical appearance is often counter-intuitive:

By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.

There is more genetic diversity within a “race” than between "races.". Further, "there is no homogeneous African race" and "there is more diversity in Africa than on all the other continents combined" (see graphic under this title here) . As reported by National Geographic in an article titled, "There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label,"

[W]hen scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”