Wearing race?

If I were still teaching the “Beyond Fiction” Tutorial, I would add this article to the reading list: Moises Velasquez-Manoff, “Can a Dress Shirt be Racist?” BackChannel [link via Medium].

Mr. Velasquez-Manoff writes:

And here’s what kept nagging at me as I reported: even as science tells us there’s no biological basis for many of the ideas we’ve inherited on race, one can sense a yearning in this soon-to-be majority minority country for acknowledgement that we do actually differ according to our ancestry, and that we shouldn’t all be held to one, in this case mostly northern European, physical standard.

The article is particularly interesting to me since I am reading Gautam Shroff’s The Intelligent Web, which is (in part) about how Big Data permits conclusions to be drawn which at least appear intelligent.