In The Moment of Racial Sight, Irene Tucker challenges the rhetoric of racial construction that, she argues, has dominated “critical analyses of race as a category” (3). Tucker suggests that while racial constructionism exposes “marks of racial difference” as social constructs, these marks “remain curiously dehistoricized themselves” (6). “What if,” she asks, “we were to consider the possibility that the very concept of an arbitrary, constructed racial sign—a stable signifier… to which various shifting and contingent values come to be appended—might itself have a history?” (6). To this end, the book studies how skin comes to be the quintessential marker of racial difference—and one that signifies race instantaneously. On the whole, Tucker’s project is to write “a history of epistemology, [so] that we investigate the relation between what we know by way of race and how we come to know it rather than simply presuming the connectedness of the two” (7).

The book’s textual range is noteworthy—as is its philosophical depth and analytical sophistication. It historicizes the epistemology of race by exploring the interconnection between Kantian philosophy and modern anatomical medicine. Tucker shows how Kant’s thinking solidifies a “skin-based notion of race,” in which “the standardness or lawfulness of the body becomes instantaneously perceptible” (49). She then analyzes how novelist Wilkie Collins uses literary realism to challenge this logic of instantaneous legibility by proposing that “to be known, bodies must be known over time” (78). In subsequent chapters she examines the “new photographic logics of perception and reproduction [that] help direct the evolution of John Stuart Mill’s notion of the public” (130), and the notion of contingency in Charles Darwin’s late work that “both becomes the condition of race’s vulnerability to transformation and sets the terms of its mandate” (199). She ends, most interestingly, with a consideration of the American television show, The Wire. The Wire, Tucker argues, “makes the exploration of [the anatomical bodily] logic its project” (203) and trains viewers “how to watch over time” so as to counter the “too-speedy legibility of race” (245). She refrains from dwelling on the show’s comments on the racism of various social institutions because these, she argues, mainly “operate as responses to and manipulations of the institutionalizing that is race” (204).

Tucker sees her book “as a supplement to” (11) a body of scholarship that “circumvents the constructionist model altogether” (10). But why, one wonders, is it so important to circumvent the constructionist model? Why does the project of analyzing the significance attached to racialized bodies have to be distinct from that of understanding how skin comes to be racialized? If racial constructionists emphasize the former project, then Tucker’s book leans almost entirely toward the latter. As a result, the reader once again loses a sense of “the relation between what we know by way of race and how we come to know it” (7; my emphasis).

More importantly, by circumventing the racial constructionist model, the book foregoes what is so essential to scholarship aimed at demystifying race: viz. a political critique of institutionalized racism. Because Tucker is invested mainly in “the institutionalizing that is race” (204), she hopes “that readers will respond to this study not simply by asking what this all has to do with slavery and colonialism but will find themselves thinking as well about how race is buttressed by ways of knowing the world that do not appear to have anything to do with race—our very understanding of the ways we inhabit, recognize, and control our bodies” (12). Although Tucker’s emphasis on how “race is buttressed by ways of knowing the world” is worthwhile, the reader is left unclear about how these ways of knowing inform power structures and unjust social institutions.

A study of why “racial categories came into being when they did, but also why they continue to have a purchase on the ways in which we perceive and organize social relations and identities” (7) has much potential significance during what is flippantly described as the “post-racial” era. The challenge lies in bringing this analysis of racial epistemology meaningfully to bear on the history and politics of race-based segregation, dispossession, and dehumanization.