ABSTRACT
Among the social paradoxes of the twenty-first century, is race. In the United States, race is both central and submerged, both “unimportant” and “all consuming,” a social fabrication and a material reality. While the presence of race exists as a familiar part of our social landscapes, the meanings of race remain conflicted and seemingly unrestrained by the demands of logic, proof, or coherence. In this chapter, I begin with the premise that racialized inequalities come to rest in those things assumed to be so real that they are undeserving of thought. For if our ideas about race can be transformed through logic, experience, and argument, commonsense is far more trenchant. For instance, just as we see the movement of the sun across the sky, even though we know the sun does not move, commonsense tells us that we still see racial differences-in hair, skin, and facial features.
