Still relevant after all these years …

… Jacques Barzun’s 1937 Critique of Race-Thinking. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Barzun had some serious nerve to suggest that race is a superstition in 1937, with Social Darwinism, eugenics, imperialism, nationalistic wars, and the rise of Fascism and Nazism all around. A second edition of Barzun’s book was released in 1965, at another historical moment of heightened racial conflict and awareness in the American Civil Rights Movement. In the preface to the second edition he wrote, “As long as people permit themselves to think of human groups without the vivid sense that groups consist of individuals and that individuals display the full range of human differences, the tendency which twenty-eight years ago I named race-thinking will persist”