The solar system is just not what it used to be, at least not what it was when I was in school. First, they tell me that Pluto is not a planet. Now, there is something that travels faster than the speed of light! This morning, while driving my husband to work, I learned that a team of international scientists have recently tracked subatomic particles that traveled sixty nanoseconds or sixty billionths of a second faster than light. This finding could potentially undermine Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and nothing can travel faster than it, a foundational principle of physics.

I am often confronted with the notion though posited as a fact that race is biological, that our differences are genetic, that it has been proven scientifically. Today, I wonder if I am simply ahead of the curve. I mean, what is meant by proven if the theory of relativity established in 1905 is now being questioned? And the subatomic particle has always been there despite their inability to track it; consequently, light was never fastest. Maybe this is why they are called theories?

Well, race is a theory among many to explain the different variations of human beings. The question of why we are different is not new but the belief and acceptance of the theory of race as the explanation for those differences is. Race began as a compilation of folk beliefs, a collection of stories that captured the interactions between two nations or cultures. Viewing human beings as races and the rationale for it only dates back to the 17th century as the concept of race gained popularity during the scientific revolution in Europe.

In 1755, Carolus Linnaeus, the creator of a zoological taxonomy, divided human beings into categories. Twenty years later, in 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach established five divisions of human beings; some of the terms are still used today in racial classification: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Ethiopian (later Negroid), American Indian and Malayan. It should be noted that there was no hierarchical ranking assigned to these groups and not all cultures were assigned a category. Sadly, much of this “science” was used to endorse colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The physical differences would soon be translated into intellectual, behavioral and moral differences. Persons would soon be sorted by color and deemed a part of the majority or the minority, the supreme or the inferior, the in or the out group.

So, stories became science became a hierarchical system. Now, a story, cloaked in the shroud of science, can walk into any aspect of American life without explanation or introduction as social truth. Well, it’s not my truth; it’s not my story. And I don’t live by theory. I live by faith and it is my means of progress as the songwriter says, “We’ve come this far by faith.” I would like to believe that it travels faster than the recently discovered subatomic particle.