Law and Race Commons^™

This article examines a profound shift in the concept of race. Although race is widely viewed as socially constructed through continuous struggles over meaning, its content has remained remarkably stable over time. Race, since the nation’s founding, has been defined mainly by three social conditions: difference, denigration, and exclusion. Among these, exclusion has been central, driving the effort to differentiate and denigrate in order to justify exclusion under the guise of utility rather than white supremacy. Especially after the ascendancy of multiculturalism in the 1990s, however, race has come to be defined by another set of social conditions. They are …