Nobody who pays any attention to the science of human genetics has any confusion about whether "race is real". It's a dramatic oversimplification which in some cases reflects ancestral phylogeny and in other cases is a hilariously wrong joke.

Yes, it is true that white people are more-or-less a clade compared to non-white people. So as a race, "white" is kind of real-ish. "Asian" is also sort of real. "Hispanic", "Latinx", etc., are all confused because at this point they reference a culture not ancestral genealogy, and people of that category are mostly a mix of the indigenous peoples of the Americas with peoples of Africa and Europe. "Black" is absurdly bonkers nonsense, being used for the most widely diverged lineages on the planet (San, Bantu, Australian Aboriginals, etc.) as well as mixtures of lineages which are mostly some "other race", e.g. ((white + black)/2 + white)/2 = black.

So, when people say that Black is a race, I view that with about the same attitude as if they say bats are birds: hahahaha, oh man.

If you want to get into more details, you can investigate human cladistics. (Also genetics, wherein you learn that the within-group differences of every major ancestrally geographically isolated group are broader than the mean differences across groups.)

However, what's especially clear is that how we react to different people is not mostly a matter of lineage. That is totally a matter of culture, and that's usually what we want to talk about.

So: to an extent, race sometimes reflects a real, but not very important, difference in biological lineage. However, almost nothing that anyone does with respect to race matters in the least. (The one exception is medicine: if you do everything on the subgroup which is white people, there might be some variation that they have and others don't, or vice versa, because they were somewhat reproductively isolated from other human populations; and anything to do with adaptive features (mostly skin pigmentation) may also be wrong. But going by cultural race, while slightly better than nothing, is also biologically dumb. You want to categorize people by ancestry.)