ABSTRACT
While the family is both an effective metaphor for community bonds and a dynamic model for the genealogical species, a problem arises when we examine the conceptual space between the individual family and the species. It is here that we must contend with the category of race, about which so much has been written over the past two hundred and some years. In order to unravel one particular thread of the tangled concept of race, we need to return fi rst to its governing concept, the species.
