Recent scholarship has argued that race is a fairly recent concept in western thought and arose concurrently with modern science. Yet, in recent decades, science has been a powerful tool employed against racialist thinking. How is it that science has been a factor for both the rise of racialist thinking and its demise? This volume of essays, drawn from the journals Isis and Osiris , demonstrates that race and political and social ideologies have interacted in complex and unexpected ways.