Some arguments feel like describing cars to people who have only known horse-drawn wagons.
You explain the engine; they ask where the horses go.
You explain the steering wheel; they call it reins.
You explain gasoline; they assume it must feed something.
Every new concept gets translated back into the old framework because that framework defines what they believe is possible. Eventually, you realize the disagreement isn’t really about the car. It’s about categories. They cannot understand the new system without forcing it into the old one.
Now imagine trying to explain a starship to them.
That is what arguing about race often feels like.
The wagon is the idea of a universal, continuous “Black race”: a single natural human category presumed to stretch seamlessly across continents, civilizations, cultures, populations, and thousands of years.
Then you introduce the starship.
You explain that race is not the same thing as ancestry. Ancestry is not phenotype. Phenotype is not ethnicity. Ethnicity is not nationality. Population history is not racial classification. And a word like “Black” appearing in two different societies or centuries does not automatically mean those societies were describing the same category in the same way.
You question whether a timeless, universal Black race is even a coherent historical category.
Their response?
“So you’re saying Black people don’t exist?”
You explain historical classification.
“But they were Black.”
You explain population history.
“But they look Black.”
You distinguish distant ancestry from historical identity.
“But they came from Africa.”
You explain that different societies constructed human categories differently.
“But they would be considered Black today.”
There are the horses again.
Every unfamiliar concept gets dragged back into the wagon.
And that is what makes these conversations so frustrating in the information age. We have historical archives, digitized primary sources, population genetics, anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and enormous research databases sitting at our fingertips. Yet access to more information does not automatically produce better thinking.
The same technology that allows someone to challenge an inherited worldview also allows them to search endlessly for material that confirms it.
So instead of using information to test the wagon, they use information to repair it.
Every contradiction receives another wheel.
Every exception gets another horse.
Every historical complication gets translated until it fits the model they already believed.
Meanwhile, you are trying to explain propulsion, navigation, orbital mechanics, and spacecraft.
They are still asking:
“Okay, but where do the horses go?”
At some point, another fact will not resolve the disagreement because the disagreement exists one level beneath the facts.
It is about the framework being used to interpret them.
Sometimes knowledge does not require adding another fact to the wagon.
It requires abandoning the wagon entirely.
