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We have all used and encountered the terms of race – racial difference, racism, racial oppression and liberation – as though their meanings are understood. Yet there exists no coherent or stable meaning for the word “race.” From a very early point in human history people developed concepts about human groups, particularly their own, based on real or perceived kinship and shared culture. They used a variety of words to describe these groups; in English they include tribe, people, ethnicity, background, race, community, and nation. Historically the group was created and maintained by intermarriage, while membership in it was understood to be contained in, and passed down through, the blood. In many cultures, “blood” also became a way of thinking about difference within the group, with those of “noble blood” prohibited from marrying commoners and taught to be concerned about their bloodlines. Blood also came to be used to describe religious and national boundaries, as people talked about “Jewish blood,” “French blood” and so on. Describing differences as blood naturalized them, making them appear as if they were divinely created. Nonetheless, people often held contradictory ideas, and religious reformers who talked about Protestant or Catholic or Jewish blood also worked for religious conversions, without thinking about whether adopting a new religion would also change a person’s blood.

As Europeans developed colonial empires in the sixteenth century, notions of blood became a way of conceptualizing the differences in continent of origin, skin tone, hair type, facial features, and other factors that eventually became associated with “race.” Though early Judeo‐Christian traditions had assumed a monogenetic view that all humans were descended from Adam and Eve and therefore represented one divinely appointed race, by the early modern period Christianity found justification for racial difference in scripture, associating black people with Noah’s cursed son, Ham, and racial difference with the mythical children of God scattered after Babel. The hierarchical social system perpetuated by the colonial powers generally put those born in Europe at the top, persons of mixed ancestry (mestizos, mulattos, caboclos, métis, castas, etc.) in the middle, and Africans and indigenous people at the bottom.

In the eighteenth century, European natural scientists sought to develop a system that would explain human differences at the largest scale. They variously identified four, five, or six categories, based on continent or place of origin, religion, skin color, and other physical or behavioral characteristics. Colonial powers also increasingly used skin color as a way to differentiate their populations. The first New Amsterdam and Virginia laws prohibiting marriage between different groups, for example, distinguished between “christian” and “negroe,” but by 1691 Virginia distinguished between “white” men and women and those who were “negroe, mulatto, or Indian.” In its use of “white” Virginia picked up language first used in a 1661 census in the British West Indies, and later this language spread throughout the British colonies. Other color designations came later, and European natural scientists seeking to develop one single system that would explain human differences settled on the concept of “race” to describe these.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, theories of racial difference increasingly used the language of science, such as Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution by natural selection. Thinkers applied evolutionary concepts to human society, arguing that history was a “survival of the fittest” in which the strong were destined to triumph and prosper; the weak to be conquered and remain poor. This “Social Darwinism” – a term coined later by its opponents – built on existing ideas about qualities passed on in the blood and about ethnic superiority, enhanced at just this point by the growth of nationalism. “Survival of the fittest” was applied to every sort of difference – nation, ethnicity, race, gender, class – and European and American scientists, anthropologists, and physicians sought to provide “proof” of these differences by measuring skulls, brains, facial angles, forehead height (the origin of the terms highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow), and other features. They published their findings in scholarly and professional journals and in books and articles for a more popular audience. Unsurprisingly, their findings supported the idea that whites were more intelligent than other races, what the noted African American historian and activist W.E.B. Dubois (1868–1963) called in 1910 “this new religion of whiteness.” The vast majority of those who wrote about race were men, but white women, including some advocating for women’s suffrage, also expressed racist views, and discriminated against black suffragists.

Theories of social evolution explained racial difference to their authors, and, more importantly, justified domination and imperialism. Native Americans and Africans, for example, were seen as embryonic races or races that had failed to evolve sufficiently in the “march of civilization.” Marxist theory, which dominated discussion in some circles long into the twentieth century, asserted that modern concepts of race evolved within the expansion of capitalism, viewing class as the root of all other oppressions. Amidst all the changing and disintegrating categories, the law of many dramatically different countries attempted to define and contain racial difference. No theory of race disappeared as others developed, and all are variously invoked in current discussions of race.

Within the last several decades, feminist scholars have increasingly focused on race. Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham asserts that race “must be seen as a social construction predicated upon the recognition of difference and signifying the simultaneous distinguishing and positioning of groups vis‐à‐vis one another…Race is a highly contested representation of relations of power between social categories by which individuals are identified and identify themselves” (1992: 253). Similarly, Margaret Maynard describes race as an “unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly transformed by political struggle” (in Bhavnani 2001: 132). Higgenbotham argues that race has come to operate as a metalanguage, with a “powerful, all‐encompassing effect on the construction and representation of other social and power relations, namely, gender, class, and sexuality” (1992: 255). In its negative totalizing effect, she asserts, race not only tends to subsume the social categories of gender and class, “it blurs and disguises, suppresses and delegates its own complex interplay with the very social relations it envelops. It precludes unity within the same gender group but often appears to solidify people of opposing economic classes” (255).

Some feminist scholars have suggested, however, that race has become, in the words of Jayne Chong‐Soo Lee, so “overdetermined that it is beyond rehabilitation” (in Crenshaw, 1995: 441). They thus shift the emphasis from discussions of race to discussions of culture, suggesting that what matters in identity formation is not an essential fact of difference but cultural identification within a group that is supposed to share a common experience. Lee acknowledges the benefits of this substitute, in dismissing historical theories of intellectual and moral racial traits asserted by late‐nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century anthropologists and social scientists, and in emphasizing racial difference as learned. She also acknowledges problems that the substitute imposes, namely that the culture model fails to account for the centrality of race in the history of oppressed peoples.

Although contemporary understandings of race highlight its culturally constructed nature, the body continues to mark racial identity and difference. For example, Eva Marie Garroutte maintains “blood quantum is the most common tribal requirement for determining citizenship” in American Indian communities, a measure imposed by both tribal and federal authorities (2001: 224–5). However, because blood quotients differ across tribes, the interpretation of those differences can have devastating consequences for individuals and families of mixed tribal ancestry, who may be barred from legal association, tribal benefits, or rights to occupy reservation land where they have lived for generations. So even here, where racial identity is determined biologically, it is also constructed, for there is no fixed or stable meaning for the term blood quotient. Moreover, individuals and groups often identify themselves racially as Native American based on family ancestry and traditions passed down through generations, regardless of authorized blood quotient, and on that basis exclude others who have maintained no cultural ties to tribal heritage.

Difference, then, is a primary category of analysis in constructing race, but it too is problematic. For to assert difference, as Tessie Liu points out, implies the question, “Different from what or from whom?” (1991: 267–8). The answer depends on who is representing the difference and on the frame of reference against which the difference (or sameness) is constructed. Thus, according to Liu, “any discussions of difference and sameness are themselves inseparable from the power relations in which we live” (268). Maynard asserts, “It is not enough to look at difference, we must consider social relations that convert difference to oppression” (in Bhavnani, 2001: 130). Higgenbotham’s definition suggests that if race often operates to convert racial difference to oppression, it can also serve as a tool for liberation, what the postcolonial and feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak (1984–5) terms “strategic essentialism.” The potential of this “double‐voiced discourse” is to “dismantle the dominant society’s deployment of race.” She points to a long tradition of African American writers since W.E.B. DuBois who have claimed the language of race and made it their own, investing it with their own meaning and intent (Higgenbotham, 1992: 266–7). Similarly, Lee acknowledges that although race is often used to subordinate, it can also be deployed as an affirmative category around which people can organize to assert power (in Crenshaw, 1995: 443) On the other hand, Liu notes that thinking about race only as an outgrowth of prejudice conceals operations of power when privilege constructs the other and makes whiteness the norm against which all others deviate. Ruth Frankenberg writes that for her students “who grew up without peers of color,” whiteness is invisible, masquerades as universal, and as such “white dominance is rationalized, legitimized, and made ostensibly normal and natural” (1997, 3). The consequence of invisible whiteness is that others carry the burden of racial difference, although it is highly unlikely that Frankenberg’s students, or anyone, grew up without knowing of racial difference.