As with the concepts of a “bourgeois” or “patriarchal” state, the idea of a “racial” state challenges conventional political taxonomies, especially when applied critically to self-conceived liberal democratic states. In this chapter, I begin in the first section by offering a general conceptualization of the racial state as involving system-wide and unjust differential racial group advantage that is causally linked to racial group power. In the second section I explore competing views on the periodization and scope of racial states, whether limited just, say, to Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, or as more generally manifest in the Euro-created polities of modernity, or (more controversially) possibly even to be found in the premodern period as well.