I grew up surrounded with the racist essentialist view, now making a vicious comeback.

The Smithsonian, the vast complex of museums that millions of Americans visit every year to see Lincoln’s top hat, the Spirit of St. Louis, Harriet Tubman’s shawl, a moon rock, and Dorothy’s ruby slippers, is at the center of the executive order’s indignation. The order takes particular issue with a sculpture exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum called “The Shape of Power,” saying that it pushes “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.”

Perhaps it is rude or “revisionist” to question the scholarship of an executive order, but the curators got it right. As a wall text at the exhibit points out, human beings are “99.9 percent genetically the same.” The opposing view, racial essentialism, is hardly benign; it is the underpinning of virulent bigotry, from the description of Jews as vermin in Der Stürmer to the assertions in white-nationalist manifestos that Black people are cursed with inferior I.Q.s.

-David Remnick in The New Yorker