ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the sociocultural, historical, political, and economic contexts in which the folk idea of race emerged have changed drastically. Contemporary developments in science suggest that the ideology of race is slowly beginning to disintegrate. The policy of specifying degrees of Indianness by an unmeasurable "blood quantum" is indicative of the distortions that the ideology of race-as-biology has forced on the American public. One of the most insidious, and tragic, aspects of the racial worldview is its substitution of a new form of identity that superseded all other traditional sources of human identity. Nothing is more indicative of the plight, and the pathology, of using race/biology as the main form of human identity than the efforts on the part of some people to establish a "mixed-race" category in the census and thus in American society. The chapter discusses the meaning and legacy of race as identity and it explains the future of the racial worldview.
