From the Washington Post news section:

SOCIAL ISSUES
Race isn’t real, science says. Advocates want the census to reflect that.
A small but vocal group of professionals and academics imagine a future where categories don’t matter

By Sydney Trent
Updated October 16, 2023 at 9:27 a.m. EDT

… Racial categories, assigned to people based on their appearance, geographic origin and other supposed attributes, got their start during the dawn of Western science in 18th century Europe. White Europeans, who then had no knowledge of human genetics and little meaningful contact with other cultures, placed themselves at the pinnacle. For centuries now, the categories have been used to divide and perpetuate every version of harm—enslavement, violence, an eclipse of opportunity. The reality of it all sometimes moves Hoyt to tears.

In 2003, the completion of the Human Genome Project—which found that humans globally share 99.9 percent of their DNA—laid waste to the notion of “race” among the vast majority of scientists. But the public appears barely to have noticed. The idea still lives everywhere—in discrimination and criminal profiling, in the rise in hate speech and acts, in the recent Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in college admissions, in the rhetoric of social justice advocates and the new capitalization of Black and White in the media. Racial categorization persists on job applications, medical forms, and most critically to Hoyt due to its high visibility, the Census.

The 63-year-old educational consultant and psychotherapist is part of a small but increasingly vocal group of people who favor phasing out racial categories. A diverse cohort of highly educated professionals and academics, they are trying to gain broader societal acceptance for their beliefs through a cottage industry of books, articles, websites, conferences and training.

Yet they recoil at the idea of being confused with people who call themselves “colorblind,” those “who are trying to deny that there is racism in the world,” Hoyt said. The government must account for harms caused by “race,” but without resorting to debunked categories that suggest it is biological, he said.

I’ll leave off revealing their proposed solution until this week’s Taki’s Magazine column, which is about a different topic almost entirely.