Race is obviously a thing. You can look at somebody and usually have a pretty good idea of whether their ancestors are from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, etc. Heck, with some practice, you can often figure out which part of Europe, Africa, Asia, etc they are from (Koreans look different than Filipinos, Eastern Europeans look different than Scandinavians, etc). And such an identification will correspond to measurable genetic differences.

Of course, this is only a coarse grained thing and there are lots of cases where somebody’s ancestry is difficult to determine based on their outward appearance, especially in cases where someone has mixed ancestry. But what most people mean by race—that you can look at most people and make a decent guess about their ancestry—is a real thing which is born out by genetics.