The Trump White House’s recently issued Executive Order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and tendentious adventures in the realms of culture and science show how ignorant he is about race. To put it kindly, he is way out of his depth.
Among all his blunders and gaffes, however, one stands out in particular: his blithe assertion that race is a matter of biology, not of “social construction.” Discussing a work of sculpture at the Smithsonian, Trump’s Executive Order criticizes the exhibit for stating that “Race is a human invention.” Indeed, the Executive Order characterizes both race and gender as largely matters of biology and human nature, and thus fixed and “objective,” not social or political matters. As scholars who have devoted decades of research to the social construction of race, we object to Trump’s shallow and backward understanding.
This administration and the broader rightwing aims to “clean up” the messy history of race and racism in the US. Trump and favor the erasure of race issues from public awareness. Their preferred approach would involve removing the African slave trade as well as slavery itself, along with Native American conquest and genocide, and immigration and exclusion (such as the WWII Japanese internment) from museum exhibits, classrooms, libraries, and textbooks alike.
To represent race as a matter of biology defies both biological and social science. As the particular Smithsonian exhibit criticized by Trump and the entire National Museum of African American History make clear, race is indeed a matter of human invention, and thus of history. It is socially constructed, its meaning and categories changing over time. Trump’s proclamations do not change that. As the American Anthropological Association Statement on Race puts it,
Historical research has shown that the idea of “race” has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them. Today scholars in many fields argue that “race” as it is understood in the United States of America was a social mechanism invented during the 18th century to refer to those populations brought together in colonial America: the English and other European settlers, the conquered Indian peoples, and those peoples of Africa brought in to provide slave labor.
By now there can be little doubt that the administration wants to roll back the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and all its allied anti-racist movements that challenged the nation’s history of white supremacy. It is this legacy, linked to aspirations for equality and social justice, driven by pent-up demands for fair housing, for high-quality healthcare and education, for voting rights and labor rights, that Trump is attacking. He cares that white supremacy is under threat and wants to preserve the inequality that is built into the fabric of our U.S. social and political system. He wants to curtail (or even eliminate) our pluralistic democracy.
In this country, politics has always been about democracy. We might even say that it is about recognizing and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. When there is more democracy there is more equality, because previously excluded peopleget a chance to participate. Oligarchs, white supremacists, white nationalists, homophobes, and toxic masculinists do not like this.
Nationalism, a show-off patriotism, and American exceptionalism are the tropes that lead us to forget the violence and predation that characterize the US past. “Who controls the past controls the future. “Who controls the present controls the past,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.
Across the entire nation, white supremacism has become a mass movement again. As it was in the 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan staged mass marches at the US capitol building, so it is again in 2025. Just like the Klan’s version of a century ago, Trump’s white supremacism of today is powered as much by nativism and anti-immigrant paranoia as it is by anti-Blackness. “The Great Replacement” theory has found supporters across the Western nations with all its attendant evil tropes. While Trump says he wants to fight antisemitism on university campuses, his white supremacist supporters are chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
But despite all Trump’s efforts, the Black freedom, the civil rights movement, and Dr. King’s vision of a racially just America lives on. Movements committed to the fair treatment of immigrants live on. According to polling data, most Americans, even many whites, still retain their belief in racial equality and racial democracy.
There is, to be sure, a great deal of confusion about what these things mean, and about what race itself means. That is ripe territory for Trump’s abilities to play on people’s fear of the other. Pitted against the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion are the fear-driven racist politics we have seen so many times in the past Our democracy has certainly been damaged but not silenced — at least not yet — by these racist assaults.
No executive order, no anti-historic and unscientific decree, should whip up ignorance and hatred in the 21st century. To recognize that race and racism are socially constructed, that they are human inventions and not biological facts, is to understand that they can be changed. Race can be understood as a type of human organizing principle, like religion or national identity. It is something that has been transformed over time. Therefore, race can be stripped of its invidious legacy and reframed as another type of human variation. Racial inequality and injustice can be understood differently too, as limits on social well-being can be greatly reduced by democratic action. That is what the civil rights movement was about and continues to be about. That is the real meaning of the “social construction of race.”
Yolanda T. Moses is Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside. She is a former President of the American Anthropological Association, former Chair of the Board of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, and former President of the City College of New York (CCNY).
Howard Winant is Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara.