One of the major social issues that plagues society is racism. Unfortunately, the mistreatment of people due to their race is a major part of American history, and it continues to be a significant problem even today. Racism is defined as the tendency to defend what is believed to be the purity of one’s race from any possible contact or contamination. In other words, racism can be defined as the belief that, based on certain observable anatomical differences between human groups, there is a corresponding intellectual and moral superiority or inferiority.

In practice, racism often takes the form of persecution and extermination of other races that are deemed inferior. Racism has been known to exist since ancient times, with the ancient Greeks calling groups of people who had settled at their borders “barbarians”.

For a long time, the concept of “race” has been founded on the basis of phenotypic diversity, which consists of external physical features, such as skin color. With the development of genetics we began to look to the genotype—the genetic composition of an organism—as a distinctive element of human groups.

It is said that the scientist Albert Einstein, upon his arrival in America after his escape from Nazi Germany, was asked what race he considered himself to be, and he reportedly answered “human”. Although this anecdote is not confirmed, we all know that the great physicist has experienced racial discrimination, himself, being Jewish.

Starting from this episode, the question that naturally arises whether or not there is such thing as different races. I answer this with a definitive no, there are not different races and the idea of a racial distinction between human beings lacks any accepted scientific validity. Different ethnic groups with different ancestral backgrounds may share common physical characteristics, but the societal division of humans up into racial categories is absurd from an objective standpoint. The very existence the idea of different races is itself the initial source of racism. In the long run, the only way to defeat racism is to make a collective society – wide effort to avoid judgments of people based on characteristics such like race, eventually eliminating the concept of race itself.