What is interesting about race as a concept is that is seems to be – an is used as – one of the most precise of categories. However, a few moments’ careful scrutiny reveals race to be precisely to opposite, loosely used to indicate ethnic origin, class, religion, nationality, even caste. Standing at the intersection of science and politics, race might be described as both politics disguised as biology, as well as a biological investigation which in most cases has a political goal. It is this simultancity of reference which gives race its ‘slippery’ quality. This investigation ranges over crucial concepts and practices such as racism, slavery and the slave trade, anthropology, intelligence testing and I.Q., anti-semitism, fascism and the Nazis, colonialism, and the nation-state, to unpack and hold up to rational scrutiny one of the most problematic but unquestioned terms in current usage today.
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