Audio version here . Black people are not really black. White people are not really white. The words “black” and “white”, applied to people, do not mean what they mean when applied, for example, to the stripes on a zebra or to objects like coal and snow. The colors of people’s skins vary on a continuum, from almost black to very light shades of pink. The words “black” and “white” (together with red, yellow, and brown) are used to divide people into distinct social categories, called “races”, with each “race” assigned a different status in social and economic life. How did this artificial way of categorizing and ranking people come to be? And why does it continue to exist in spite of all the political work done to challenge it over the past 60+ years? In my last post, I argued that racism originated with slavery in the American south in colonial times as a way of preventing alliances between poor whites and African slaves, and it continues to function as what W.E.B