Ink & Shadows: The Words of Osiris j Reapor

We are living through a moment when being anything other than white feels unsafe again. The country is slipping back toward an old fear, an old myth, an old way of sorting people that has always done more harm than good.

This hits close because my entire existence challenges the idea of race. My mother’s side carries Black and Cuban roots, braided with Swedish and Native ancestry. My father’s side brings Chinese and Mexican lines. My children carry all of that and Filipino as well. We are the kind of family that makes racial categories fall apart the moment you try to use them. But that has never stopped the world from trying.

My grandmother taught me to see people for what they do and not what they look like. I repeat that lesson to my kids. The world does not. Even some of my own siblings began clinging to racial labels as they got older, as if belonging required picking one piece of our heritage and ignoring the rest. Where we once proudly called ourselves mixed, some now insist on fitting into a racial category.

I cannot follow them down that path. Not because culture is unimportant, but because race itself is not real. I know where this idea came from. I know what it was built to do.

There is no scientific basis for separate human races. None. We share 99.9 percent of our DNA. There is more genetic variation within any group than between groups. Richard Lewontin, a leading population geneticist, put it plainly in 1972: “Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations.”

Our features reflect geography, sun exposure, and migration. That is it. But instead of treating these differences as part of the human story, a small group of people turned them into a hierarchy. I have been called mutt, like a dog, by people who think purebred dogs are superior. The irony is that purebred and inbred dogs are unnatural creations of humans. They suffer more, not less. The insult never made sense.

Race was not discovered. It was created. And it was created for one purpose: control.

The modern idea of race took shape during European colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Before that, people identified by village, tribe, religion, language, or region, not race. But as colonial powers expanded, they needed a story that made conquest feel righteous. They needed a system that turned land theft, slavery, and brutality into something that seemed natural.

So they built one. They created charts ranking humans by skin tone. They wrote laws assigning human value based on ancestry. They bent religious texts into tools of domination.

Historian Theodore W. Allen summed it up clearly: “The white race was invented as a ruling-class social control formation.” Whiteness was not an identity. It was a political strategy.

One moment reveals this strategy more clearly than almost any other: Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676. Poor Europeans and poor Africans worked side by side as indentured servants. They lived in the same conditions. They often married. They rose up together against the elite landowners of Virginia.

Their unity terrified the ruling class.

After the rebellion, colonial leaders made a calculated decision:
• elevate poor Europeans by calling them white
• strip Africans of legal personhood
• split the laboring class in two

This was the birth of race-based slavery in America. Not because Europeans saw themselves as white. Not because Africans saw themselves as Black. But because those in power needed workers to distrust each other instead of rebelling together.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” That line was drawn on purpose.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, European thinkers tried to cement race as scientific fact. They measured skulls. They invented categories. They claimed superiority was biological. None of it was true. But it was politically useful. Immanuel Kant argued that non-Europeans were “less suited” for civilization. Thomas Jefferson claimed enslaved Africans were “inferior in the faculties of reason.” These were not observations. They were excuses. They gave colonizers cover. They gave slaveholders language. They gave governments justification.

Once this ideology spread through schools, churches, courts, and media, race felt natural. But it was never natural. It was policy.

Living in a mixed family makes the absurdity of race impossible to ignore. My existence alone exposes how shaky the category is. Yet society still uses it to decide who belongs, who is safe, who is dangerous, and who deserves dignity.

Ta-Nehisi Coates captured the truth in seven words: “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” Racism existed first. Race was built to explain it.

That is why it hurts when people cling to racial categories as if they are essential truths. As if the boxes designed to control us should now define us. We shrink ourselves when we accept those boxes. We carry forward the same system that once divided the working class, the colonized, the enslaved, and the immigrant.

So where does that leave someone like me? Someone who cannot be put in a box.

I stand in a place where categories collapse. The world wants a simple answer to what I am. But I am many things at once. My children are too. Our faces carry continents. Our history spans oceans. We are proof that humanity has always mixed, always crossed borders, always blended.

My little family is what the world looks like when you strip away the lies.

So when I refuse racial labels, I am not ignoring race. I am naming what it is. A story created to justify harm. A story that never served people like me. A story still used against so many today.

And although I do not believe race is real, I understand the danger of living in a society that treats it like gospel. That is the tension we live in:
Race is not real.
Racism absolutely is.
One is a myth. The other is a weapon.

My hope is that more people learn the history so we can stop treating race like truth. So we can stop inheriting divisions created centuries ago to keep the poor fighting the poor. So my children can grow up in a world that sees their full identity, not the box a stranger forces on them.

We do not have to believe the lie just because it has been repeated. We do not have to act like race is fate. We can learn the history, break the pattern, and build something better.

And maybe then being anything other than white will no longer feel like a threat. Maybe then we can finally see each other the way I was raised to see the world: human first, human always.