Americans believe in the reality of 'race' as a defined, indubitable
feature of the natural world. Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep
features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy
them--inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way,
racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is
left to deplore the Middle Passage or Trail of Tears the way one
deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be
cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father.
-- Ta-Nehisi Coates. Between the World and Me. (2015).
page 7.