ABSTRACT
We have seen in the previous chapter how sociologists encounter difficulties in providing consistent accounts of racism and race and that their lack of clarity over the ontological status of race is a source of many of these difficulties. This lack of clarity, it was also argued, reflects a larger uncertainty over the sociological enterprise as a whole, an uncertainty exacerbated by the rise of postmodernism and the various forms of relativism associated with it (see, for example, Bauman 1987; Harding 1991; Mouzelis 1995).
