ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 I pointed to a crisis in the use of a concept of race prompted by the abandonment of the race category in natural sciences and the revelations about its political and ideological uses in right wing political movements. This crisis placed the notion of race in an uneasy relation to social science, compelling various forms of corrective adjustment by those who wished to retain the concept. The most common strategy, already noted, was to abandon the use of race notions as adequate descriptors of biological divisions within humankind and instead to defend them as terms employed by lay actors in ‘getting on in the world’. Race notions were simply an element in the everyday social lexicon used by social actors to negotiate daily interactions. This is the use of race ideas as phenomenological categories, as a ‘frame’ for the interpretation of routine social interactions.
