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By “assigning meaning” I mean that we take some superficial information about a human body and that body’s ancestry and then draw inferences about deeper and more distant matters. I’ll refer to the development, establishment, or application of this pattern of inference as a process of racialization. These meanings are “generic” in the sense that they apply most saliently to populations rather than to individuals.

It used to be conventional wisdom and accepted practice to say that people of certain races, which is to say people who have certain kinds of bodies or are descended from people with certain kinds of bodies, also have certain levels of intelligence, or that they are predisposed to like and produce certain kinds of music, or that they have a certain predilection to give themselves over to various passions, sexual and otherwise. Many people still say such things and many more still believe them, but this kind of inference is less central to overt public discourse than it was in, say, the late nineteenth century. This is the great triumph of the physical scientist’s challenge to the Klansman, discussed above. The transmission of traits across human generations just doesn’t work the way the Klan requires, for reasons and in ways we’ll consider in the pages to come.

Still, this running together of physiology, cognition, culture, and psychology isn’t the only way to assign generic meanings. As we’ll see later on, much thinner inferences are available. One might focus, for example, on the question of whether having a certain kind of body, or being descended from people with certain bodies, correlates with certain levels of income or net worth, or with different degrees of access to credit or of household proximity to environmental hazards.

These inferences are about generic meanings in the following sense. If I look at John’s face and decide that he looks smart, I probably haven’t yet started thinking racially. If, on the other hand, I decide that he looks smart because his facial features mark him as a member of a human population that tends to be smart, then I’m on the way to race-thinking. Race-thinking is about kinds, called races, and only derivatively about individuals with racial identities.