Instead, Columbus’s arrival represented the beginning of an era of European colonization, motivated by profit and predicated on unpaid labor. Race has been so inscribed into American society that nowadays it is hard to imagine another reality. But in the early decades of European contact with North America, the racial caste system had not yet been developed. Race is a social construct. There is no biological basis for the superiority or inferiority of any human being based on the amount of melanin