Roberts begins Chapter 1 by defining race as a political category “disguised as a biological one” (4), immediately underscoring the main thesis of the book: The political category of race gathers weight from its supposedly biological foundation. This distinction is important because framing race as a biological category allows the attribution of political inequalities to biological differences. In other words, the myth of race as a biological category maintains the political category of race, which maintains inequalities.

There is a long history of humans dividing one another into groups; human classification systems have existed across cultures, as seen in ancient Egypt and Biblical texts. Though these systems often classify humans into groups of greater and lesser status, these systems are not racial: They do not insist on categories into which each human must fit. Our modern, current understanding of race gradually developed from the 1500s.

So, too, has slavery existed across cultures. The term “slave” originates with the term Slav, designating a group of European (Slavic) peoples, who were enslaved starting in the ninth century. Europeans, often considered the ancestors of enslavers, thus have a long history of being subjected to slavery themselves. Ancient people, too, enslaved people as payments for debt or punishment for crime, and desperately poor parents might sell their children into slavery in the Roman Empire.