Prologue

PROLOGUE

WE’RE ALL JUST stardust in skin suits.

That’s the truth, stripped down. Peel back the outer layer, and there’s no such thing as white. Or Black. Or brown. Or red, or yellow, or whatever other box they tried to fit us in. It’s all just melanin. It’s all just light and pigment. It’s all just survival.

So how did something so meaningless become everything?

Why do we organize our cities around it? Our laws? Our borders? Our money, our power, and our fear? How did “race,” a word that didn’t even exist a few centuries ago, become the most dangerous idea humans ever believed?

It didn’t come from science. It didn’t come from God. It didn’t even come from hate, at first.

It came from story.

The story that difference meant destiny. That skin meant soul. That your place in the world could be judged by how the sun painted your ancestors. That someone had to be on top and someone had to be beneath.

That story was useful. It helped build ships. It helped build colonies. It helped build empires and sweatshops and prisons and ghettos. It paid dividends. And even when the story changed clothes, from slavery to segregation to statistics, it never really went away.

Because race isn’t a fact. It’s a fiction with power.

And fictions with power shape reality.

This is the story of how we made it up.

And what it cost us.