This book addresses a perennial question in the philosophy of rights. If we have any moral rights at all how do we acquire them? The reader may wonder why we should care about this question. Well, the short answer is that we should care because considerable normative weight is placed on having rights and because the prevailing response to how we come to have them is overvalued. It will become clear why I think that these two concerns are related as the argument of this book unfolds. Suffice it to say for now that the prevailing conception of how we acquire moral rights is overvalued largely because too much normative weight has been placed on having them. I substantiate this charge in large part by attending to the legacy of such rights as instruments of racial subordination, particularly in the United States of America prior to the abolition of black chattel slavery. Specifically, I argue that we have reason to diminish the normative weight assigned to moral rights—as they are understood according to the prevailing philosophical view—and that this paves the way for grounding moral rights not in facts pertaining to how subjects are constituted but in facts pertaining to whether subjects have been afforded a certain kind of social recognition. Hence the main claim defended here is that taking the legacy of race and racial subordination into account gives us good reasons for taking moral rights to be acquired by virtue of some form of social recognition.