In his book A theory of race, the philosopher Joshua Glasgow observes that: ‘When I first mention to civilian friends and students that many academics think race is nothing but an apparition, one common reaction is incredulity’; and that this ‘departure from conventional wisdom … might make academics appear to be unglued from the real world’ (Glasgow 2009: 4). The academics that Glasgow is referring to are, in the main, social scientists, particularly those who insist on race as a social construction, a stance in contrast to the idea that race has any natural or biological basis. But it is an insistence that sets up odd ideas about the status and reality of race, and the relationship between society and nature. In a rush to dismiss biology, the natural and the real are sometimes conflated as if they mean the same thing, to be replaced by the social and constructed. Divisions between the social and the natural, or between culture and environment, or construction and essence are the core of a problem about the ontological status of race. To take one example, the opening to an introductory US textbook says that: ‘the classifying of individuals by external physiological appearances is purely a societal product. Race, as used in social discourse in America, is a bogus term. There is no biological validity to the term “race”’ (Better 2008: 3). This statement combines a fair opening statement with the view that race is false, because it is not founded in biology; hence the use of race in quote marks.

The long-standing, and sometimes circular, debates about what race ‘really’ is – and what it means – is pithily captured in Brett St Louis’ (2005: 29–30) sharp observation that ‘attempts at definitive racial understanding have arrived at the following conclusions: race does/ does not exist and we should/should not use the concept’. As St Louis goes on to argue, the search for a conclusive understanding of what race is can obscure the more important issue of what race does, including what is done through race (Lentin 2015, 2017). Race in its many forms as racial identity, as self-classification, as observed and reflected, as phenotype, and as racial ancestry (Roth 2016) is summoned, debated, enacted, performed and measured in a great variety of ways in discourses that stretch across academic and non-academic divides.