Abstract

This essay explores how academics know when they are looking at something called “race.” Given that the term has an uneven history, there is some disagreement about when the concept fully emerged, and social scientists often now argue that race is implicitly at issue in public discourses, even if it does not appear overtly. I argue that there are significant continuities that allow us to recognize when race is at work; these are linked to “nature” and to colonial histories and categories. This is not a static definition, because nature and colonially derived categories themselves change over time and take on new forms.