not as an objective physical group of genetic characteristics,
and it has been portrayed by them as merely a social construct, created only by white people, and by no other races, in order to justify and rationalize their alleged unique oppression of Africans people in the colonial period, but really extending throughout history and pre history, and including not merely that of African slaves brought to America and the Western Hemisphere and the Middle east.
In the 1619 project formulation all white people are guilty of original sin against all non white people who are innocent of the taint of racism themselves.
Nicholas Wade has a useful chapter on the evolution of the concept and investigation of races back into the 19th century.
He discusses how several exiled or refuge Jewish social scientists, having fled the holocaust and determined to undermine the very idea of the obvious objective reality of racial differences, created the notion that the concept of racial differences itself merely a white racist social construct. A Troublesome Inheritance.