The texts discussed illustrate general methodological and pedagogical problems faced by the social sciences. Because of their illustrative nature each of these texts makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how it is that social scientists conceive of and deploy ‘race’ as an analytic category and how this impacts on the production of knowledge about crime control and social justice. In this way, the texts are telling in terms of how analytic categories, more generally, are treated in teaching and research. Through a comparative approach this essay takes three recent texts as a vehicle to argue that the consideration of epistemological issues stemming from the employment of central analytic categories cannot be avoided and that attempts to do so yield a passive rather than active engagement with the object of analysis. Moreover, passive approaches do not serve to represent a critically engaged, social scientific enquiry.