In fact, the idea that all of humanity can be divided into four or five (or however many) racial groups is relatively new. Ancient Greeks, for example, never thought of themselves as “white.” As Tim Whitmarsh noted in Aeon in 2018, “Greeks simply didn’t think of the world as starkly divided along racial lines into black and white: that’s a strange aberration of the modern, Western world, a product of many different historical forces, but in particular the transatlantic slave trade and the cruder aspects of 19th-century racial theory.”
Peter G. Prontzos, “The Concept of “Race” Is a Lie,” Scientific American, May 14, 2019. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-concept-of-race-is-a-lie/.
