Not unlike the networks of meaning and actions that coalesce and continually refashion the powerful idea of race, writing a multiauthored book on race comes about through the synergies of multiple personal, institutional, and professional connections. In writing this book, we have had the benefit of a large, complex, active, and supportive network. This has been invaluable in our project.

Race looks different depending on one’s experience, place, and history. We expect, then, that this book will strike each reader in slightly different ways. They may gravitate to areas that have particular, individual interest and meaning. However, this book is meant to be read from front to back as a sort of primer on race, human biological variations, and racism. It is unique with respect to the breadth of subjects covered, as well as the depth of information and analysis presented for each.

In three parts, we explain how politicians, scientists, and others created and made race biological as a justification for inequalities; why human biological categories of race are nothing more than science fiction; and how race and racism nonetheless continue to influence most aspects of our lives today. As a companion to the larger project called RACE: Are We So Different?, we have designed this book to show, in broadly accessible language, how these three topics are linked inextricably. Seeing these connections, whether they are obvious or hidden, is fundamental to any real understanding of race and racism. We hope that our main messages are expressed in ways that resonate with all readers.

The project that led to this book first took recognizable shape in 1997. One of us, Yolanda Moses, then president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the world’s largest and foremost organization of professional anthropologists, called together a group of scholars from the subfields of anthropology to talk to each other about what race means in each.

The participants came out of that session with a clear consensus that, rather than occupying conceptually different universes, we had many points of agreement: much more agreement than difference. We came to these points from different intellectual histories and with different observations and data. We found that the subfields of anthropology, such as linguistic anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and political anthropology, highlighted diverse aspects of the complexly protean idea of race and the dynamics of racism.

Remember the parable of the blindfolded individuals touching different parts of an elephant? One touches the tail and thinks she has a snake. Another touches the trunk and thinks he is feeling a wall. It was much like that. It was clear that working together, and ultimately with colleagues from other fields from physics to the humanities, was the best way of describing and understanding the whole of the elephant that is race and racism.

Finally, it was also clear just how harmful the idea of race had been and continues to be in the hands of individuals with the power to maintain and benefit from a racial status quo. Systems of inequalities were built and are maintained around the unchallenged idea that racial differences and inequalities are biological and natural. These notions reverberate even more widely today. However, it is apparent that they are refutable and simply based on bad science. This is why we felt compelled to educate that race is powerful, but not based in genes or biology, rather on a deeply held cultural and therefore changeable concept. We hope this book helps to change how we understand biological and cultural diversity.

We concluded then that we had the potential through anthropology and other sciences to talk to one another and to articulate to a larger public that race as we know it is a social construct. Through the lenses of biology (human variation), history, and lived experience, we created a multi‐layered framework to talk about what race is, and what it is not. We needed to do more than talk to our colleagues about this approach. Our students have been invaluable in this process. This book would not have been possible without them, and we hope that we will reach more college classrooms in this second edition. We need to continue to elevate the public discussions about race, bringing it back to fundamental issues such as how race came about in history and was invented, and how race and human variation are different. And we needed to try and include everyone in the discussion.

The RACE public education program, of which this book is a part, was launched by a steering committee under the guidance of the AAA and the staff leadership of Dr. Peggy Overbey. The tangible results include a website (www.understandingrace.org), created by S2N Media, Inc. (led by Kathy Prusinksi), and a museum exhibit, designed and built with our museum partners, the exceptional staff of the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM), led by then president Eric Jolly, with the project headed by Robert Garfinkle and Joanne Jones‐Rizzi. To them, we owe our first and deepest gratitude. This book simply would never have happened if not for Robert and Joanne, their creative and resourceful team, and their courageous and collaborative spirit.

Due to the success of the first edition of this book, and because race and racism remain all too salient, we undertook an expanded and updated second edition, designed to reach a wider audience. Many of the essays are revised and will help to shed new light on topics such as slavery, scientific racism, and health and educational disparities. The science section has been updated to reflect current information on human genetic diversity. New data and analyses appear rapidly, but reaffirm a basic structure of genetic diversity completely incompatible with the idea of race.

The racial landscape has shifted since we wrote the first edition of RACE. Today, few would suggest we have entered a “post‐racial” era of American life. Unfortunately, recent years instead have seen a resurgence of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of racism, especially since Donald Trump succeeded Barack Obama as U.S. president. Terms like “white nationalism” and “white supremacy” are once again common in public discourse amid increased police violence against communities of color and a sharp rise in anti‐immigrant sentiment. With this edition, then, we thought it important to make even clearer the connections between racial ideology – beginning with the basic belief in human biological races – and racism. Thus, we greatly expanded the sections on the politics of race and the struggles for racial justice in policing, law enforcement, and related domains.

Once again, this book is about a bad but powerful idea. We tell the story of how, at a critical point in history, some people managed to transform aspects of human variation into social vulnerability. We explore the consequences of this decision, which range from subtle but damaging microaggressions to public symbols, and from displays of hatred to state‐sanctioned separation of families and even genocide. At the same time, we acknowledge that people have always fashioned from their troubled histories collective identities. These identities engender pride and take on shared meanings beyond whatever negative experiences or attributes may be associated with them by others. Social racial identities are no different.

Ultimately, though, we ask: are we really so different, if human races never evolved but the idea of race did? For most, this question has no simple or single answer. So, we offer this book as a resource for discussing, reflecting on, and drawing your own conclusions about race and human diversity. We also invite you to join us in reclaiming human diversity from race and racism – and in celebrating the fact that our differences pale in comparison to what makes us the same.

The second edition of RACE is an outgrowth of almost two decades of work that went into the conceptualization, research, and construction of the website and especially into the creation of the components of the museum exhibit. Many people and organizations assisted AAA in developing, producing, and implementing the RACE: Are We So Different? public education program. They include the Project Advisory Board members: Michael L. Blakey (College of William and Mary), Louis Casagrande (Children’s Museum of Boston), Robert Hahn (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Faye Harrison (University of Illinois), Thomas Holt (University of Chicago), Janis Hutchinson (University of Houston), Marvin Krislov (formerly of Oberlin College), Richard Lewontin (Harvard University), Jeffrey Long (University of New Mexico), Shirley Malcom (American Association for the Advancement of Science), Carol Mukhopadhyay (San Jose State University), Michael Omi (University of California, Berkeley), Kyeyoung Park (University of California, Los Angeles), Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia University), Enid Schildkrout (Museum for African Art), Theodore Shaw (Columbia University), Marcelo Suarez‐Orozco (New York University), David Hurst Thomas (American Museum of Natural History), Russell Thornton (University of California, Los Angeles), and Arlene Torres (City University of New York).

Additionally, AAA staff contributed extensively to the project. They include executive directors William Davis and Ed Liebow; Elaine Lynch, deputy executive director; Suzanne Mattingly, former controller; Susannah Bodman and Lauren Schwartz, former media relations associates; Lucille Horn, former meetings director; Khara Minter, former meetings coordinator; Stacy Lathrop and Dinah Winnick, former managing editors, Anthropology News; Oona Schmid, former director of publishing; Damon Dozier, former director of public affairs; Amy Goldenberg, managing editor, Anthropology News; Mark Booker, production editor, Anthropology News; and Carla Fernandez, meetings planner and exhibits manager.

Felica Gomez worked as an intern on the project and coauthored the family guide published on the RACE Project website. Amy Beckrich served as project assistant, helping to coordinate the massive project and keep everyone in line. Because of her excitement about the project, Mary Margaret Overbey left a permanent position at AAA and was for many years the force behind the project as its director through to the completion of the website and exhibit. Leslie Walker and Alexandra Frankel were invaluable in helping to pull together images for the second edition.

The exhibit and the book have benefited immensely from collaborations with California Newsreel. Under the directorship of Larry Adelman, California Newsreel produced the exceptional video “Race: The Power of an Illusion” (see www.pbs.org/race). This award‐winning documentary film has been an inspiration to our project, and in fact we have portions of two interviews from it in this book.

A number of eminent scholars from a cross‐section of disciplines graciously agreed, under tight deadlines and time constraints, to write and include their voices in the form of guest essays; our profound thanks go to Kamari Clarke, Faye Harrison, Nina Jablonski, Kenneth Kidd, Ian Haney López, Carol Mukhopadhyay, Michael Omi, Nell Irvin Painter, Mica Pollock, Susan Reverby, Audrey Smedley, Deborah Thomas, Arlene Torres, Bonnie Urciuoli, and Joseph Watkins for participating in the first edition and for their timely updates to the second. Other individuals have been directly quoted or featured in the book via excerpts from “Race: The Power of an Illusion” or their inclusion in the museum exhibit. These include scientists Joseph Graves and Richard Lewontin. The story of sickle cell is movingly told by Frank and Vickie Giacomazza.

At Wiley Blackwell, we were guided and encouraged through the first edition by Rosalie Robertson and Julia Kirk. Rosalie saw at the very start the importance of our project. In an incredibly efficient manner, she and Julia were able to elicit seven insightful and very constructive manuscript reviews, which we used to enhance our final product. We also wish to thank these anonymous reviewers.

For the second edition, we were guided and encouraged by Rachel Greenberg and Richard Sampson. Richard doggedly helped secure permissions and Rachel expertly oversaw all aspects of production. The cover was designed by Joanna Vieira.

Neither would this project have come about without the many individuals who have allowed us to use their images and text (see individual credits). Major financial support for the project was provided by the AAA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Ford Foundation specifically provided funding to start the project and to produce the book that you are now holding. We express our deep gratitude to the funding program officers: Al Desena at NSF and Margaret Wilkerson, Gertrude Fraser, Irma McClaurin, and Irene Korenfield at the Ford Foundation.

In the course of this project, we have all benefited from help in many forms and from many people. Alan Goodman wishes to thank numerous students, staff, and faculty at Hampshire College and other venues, not least the 8th graders at Amherst Regional Middle School, Massachusetts, who helped in thinking through the best way to communicate ideas around race and human variation: In the early 1990s, my colleagues and I helped organized “teach‐ins” on race, not because of any crisis but just to educate about the myriad ways that race permeates our (mostly white) lives. My father taught me to be critical and always question my position. I learned about the power of stories from filmmakers Larry Adelman, Christine Sommers, and Lew Smith and exhibit developers including Joanne Jones‐Rizzi and Robert Garfinkle. In addition to advisory board members, many colleagues have helped me, including, but not limited to, Larry Adelman, George Armelagos, Lee Baker, Michael Blakey, Joseph Graves, Faye Harrison, Evelynn Hammonds, Thomas Leatherman, Richard Lewontin, Jonathan Marks, Michael Montoya, Lynn Morgan, Leith Mullings, Dean Robinson, and Banu Subramanian. Chaia Heller, my spouse and a cultural anthropologist, added tremendous insight into how to communicate the power of the idea of race, not to mention giving me daily moral support. I hope this book will help to unveil some of the systems behind race and racism, and why racism hurts.

Yolanda Moses wishes to thank the many people who have helped to make this project a reality for her and who have given her personal support over the years: At UC Riverside, the intellectual contributions of Tom Patterson, Wendy Ashmore, Christine Gailey, Sang Hee Lee, T. S. Harvey, and Juliet McMullin have been invaluable to me as I have worked on ideas for this book. I thank them for that support. A special thanks goes to the students in my classes who challenged me to explain the intricacies of the social construction of race and human variation in ways that tracked with their everyday experiences of race and racism. I want to thank the following graduate students who helped me with various tasks connected to this book, from basic research to helping to track down numerous permissions: Scott Smith, John Gust, Jenny Banh, Priscilla LoForte, Isabel Placentia, Richard Alvarez, Linda Hall, Holly Okonkwo, and Doris Logan. Special thanks to staff members Felecia Garrett and Sonia Zamora who helped me to type early drafts. And finally, thanks to my family, my husband of almost 45 years James F. Bawek, and my two grown daughters, Shana and Toni, who have been my sounding board for my ideas, research, and activities for this project since its inception. To my 97‐year‐old mother, Willie Lee Moses, I give thanks for her encouragement to complete this project so that others may know what it means “to not live a day of your life without thinking about race.”

Joseph Jones would first like to thank Alan Goodman and Yolanda Moses for their invaluable support and guidance towards realizing a vision of public anthropology and social justice. Numerous others who share this vision gave generously of their time and knowledge: They include Michael Blakey and Mark Mack (who together introduced me to the worlds of anthropology at Howard University), Faye Harrison, Audrey Smedley, R. Brooke Thomas, Alan Swedlund, Bob Paynter, John Bracey, Maddie Marquez, Dula Amarasiriwardena, Warren Perry, John Higginson, and many more at University of Massachusetts–Amherst and outside of the academy. I hope their varied insights and influences come through as you read this text. My work has also been supported by numerous colleagues and students at the College of William and Mary. A special thanks goes to Deans Kate Conley and Virginia Torczon, and to Katie Bragdon, Brad Weiss and Martin Gallivan, Linda Triponi, and Marisa LeForge for institutional support. I also want to thank Chardé Reid for being such an inspiring graduate student and the students of my biocultural courses for keeping me hopeful! Danielle and Nia, my wife and daughter, graciously provided necessary time and encouragement. To my mother and late father, Mary and Robert Jones, I am grateful for so many enduring lessons and of course for your decades of steadfast support and confidence. My efforts here are an extension of your inability to settle for racism. May this book help others to see through social inequality to the truth of human equality.