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The aim so far has been to get clearer on the subject of this study, on some of the methods and limits of the discussion, and on why it’s okay, even important, to start a study of race-talk somewhere other than in the weeds of a fight about whether to abolish race-talk altogether. Now we can finally get down to the business of definition.

My reading of the racial practices in which I’ve been immersed and raised suggests that race-talk – including the internal, often intuitive form of it that I’ve been calling “race-thinking” – is a way of assigning generic meanings to human bodies and bloodlines. In this spirit, some scholars urge us to think of race as a “political technology” that “displaces social conflicts” onto human persons and populations.⁸ To make sense of all that, and of how I mean for it to specify the conceptual role of “race,” we’ll need some more definitions.