Sohrab Ahmari: Race Was Invented By Liberals

False.

   This is a stupid strategy that many conservatives can't resist: accept critical petard theory in order to own the libs with their own ones. 

   Races are natural, biological kinds, though not of a terribly significant grade. A common recent leftist sophistry is to just deny the reality of inconvenient things: political correctness, cancel culture, Antifa, race...even, now, sex...all unreal... But also not. "Socially real"! The craptastic phrase 'socially constructed' and its cognates is part of the problem here. Among its other defects, it's used to mean unreal when that's convenient for the left...and not to mean that when that's convenient. It's basically an equivocation machine that gives them two different routes to rhetorical victory in every argument...and virtually guarantees to confuse any discussion it appears in. (Though Ahmari doesn't use the phrase, he might as well have.)

   How can someone's bullshit detector be so broken as to allow them to believe that no one noticed group differences in appearance among humans prior to the Enlightenment? 

   To the credit of the "the Enlightenment invented race" crowd, at least it's an actual, testable hypothesis--an improvement on their usual habit of offering unempirical, unfalsifiable gibberish... So here's a prediction of the theory: we should find no references to races prior to the Enlightenment. 

   Anybody wanna guess what the outcome of that test is?