The aim of this interesting and timely edited volume is to analyze important questions that shape contemporary social and political life, such as: What is race? What is ethnicity? How are they related? And how have the experiences of blacks and Latinos in the United States shaped our understanding of them? The 12 essays provide different, and sometimes directly opposing, answers to these questions. Methodologically, the volume is unified by the fact that virtually all of the contributors are philosophers. As such, it is likely to appeal mostly to political theorists working on race and multiculturalism, but it will also be of interest to political scientists in other subfields interested in race and ethnicity, especially Latino politics.

The volume is poised to make two principal contributions: to introduce readers to philosophical perspectives by and about Latinos, and to make an important intervention in the now-extensive literature in philosophy and political theory on race by explicitly addressing the relationship between the concepts of race and ethnicity, which has been comparatively understudied. The six essays in Part I of the book are concerned with racial and ethnic identity, while those in Part II are grouped under the heading of racism, justice, and public policy.

Like many edited volumes that emerge from conferences, this book, while excellent in many respects, suffers from unevenness and thematic inconsistency. The chapters in Part I are generally more closely related to the theme of the book and to each other than are those in Part II. There are a few otherwise fine essays, for example, that seem to speak to the themes of the book only tangentially, if at all, such as Susana Nuccetelli's on externalist accounts of ethnic identity and Kenneth Shockley's on exploitation. Other essays are structured mainly as responses to criticisms of previous works, which makes it difficult to evaluate them as stand-alone pieces. For example, the aim of Jorge Gracia's essay is to defend the ability of his previously formulated “familial-historical view” of ethnicity to recognize individual instances of racial and ethnic groups. Similarly, Angelo Corlett's essay is a defense of the “differentialist” account of affirmative action he supports—that is, that redress must correspond to the degree of harm, and harms can be ranked in order of severity—that would exclude or accord only the lowest level of benefits to Anglas (white women).

Meanwhile, the two thought-provoking essays by Linda Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta, which take on contemporary Latino politics most directly, cover a lot of ground while seeming to lack a central focus. Alcoff's essay seeks to make sense of how race matters for ethnicity and vice versa. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to an analysis of how race and ethnicity work together in daily life in a way that contradicts the analytical distinction between them, leading her to suggest that we adopt a notion of comparative racisms instead. Mendieta is concerned with how Latinos should utilize the law in their struggles for justice. He argues that Latinos, who suffer from similar disparities in education and incarceration as African Americans, and who have benefited from the Civil Rights struggles of the former, nevertheless cannot articulate their demands solely in terms of racial justice because they are neither a race nor an ethnicity but a combination of the two.

The essays by Kwame Anthony Appiah, J. L. A. García, and Naomi Zack stake out opposite ground regarding how to approach racial and ethnic identity. Appiah defends the view that social identities are valuable (pp. 33–35) and refines previously formulated claims here, especially in his recognition of the importance of racial/ethnic identities to human flourishing. García takes the opposite view: that race and ethnicity should not be considered identities at all. He argues in favor of a “deflationary” approach that aims to diminish the salience of racial and ethnic identity in the emotional and moral lives of individuals (pp. 69–70). Similarly, Zack argues that race does not exist and cannot be adequately theorized, and that meaningful social change might be better achieved by focusing on gender (pp. 101–2). While both Zack and García advocate a repudiation of race, they also suggest a focus instead on what they view as more fundamental elements of individual identity and morality: gender and family, polity, and religion, respectively. The reasons why these are to be considered more “fundamental” elements of identity are never made entirely clear in either essay, however. There is, thus, an interesting tension between their views and Appiah's, especially as his position has evolved; but overall, his at least appears to be the more consistent analysis of how social identities function.

There are also disagreements about whether it is possible or desirable to distinguish between race and ethnicity. Corlett, for example, claims that ethnicity is a more suitable tool for public policy than race. This position is directly challenged by Robert Bernasconi's fine essay, which draws on Alain Locke's notion of “ethnic race” to argue that it may be possible to separate race and ethnicity analytically but not phenomenologically. He shows that historically, race and culture have not always been as categorically separated as they are today, and observes that it is because race is seen as solely biological that the rejection of any basis for it in biology is seen as sufficient to deny its existence altogether (p. 128).

Many of the essays in the volume point to the fact that philosophers still have a difficult time coming to terms with the affective dimensions of racial and ethnic identity. The disagreements among the contributors are between the need to recognize that race and ethnicity do important work for individuals (beyond being tools of antiracist struggle) and the belief that this aim would be best accomplished by renouncing race entirely. Those who advocate the latter approach leave unexplored the tension between skepticism about the usefulness of racial identity and racism's endurance, which can hardly be attributed entirely to the attachment of blacks and Latinos to these identities.

Howard McGary's excellent essay takes up the important question of the tensions experienced by those who deny race any ethical value but also affirm its political necessity (p. 157). He draws on Frederick Douglass's complex position as a racial assimilationist who also supported “complexional” institutions as a temporary measure in order to suggest that contemporary advocates of the renunciation of race who defend race-conscious institutions today risk incoherence. He suggests that the existence of cognitive barriers that do not allow whites to see black suffering means that blacks must rely on black institutions to redress such harms, which in turn means that eliminationists should accept the need for (at least temporary) race-conscious institutions (p. 169).

Finally, Diego von Vacano's very interesting essay outlines a “synthetic paradigm” of race (p. 248) that he claims is distinctive to Latin American political thought. He illustrates the development of this view—which holds that races should not be conceived as “reified, discrete, and immutable entities, but rather social categories,” ones that may be rooted in biology but are the product of mixing (p. 249)—by focusing on Bartolomé de Las Casas, José Martí, and José Vasconcelos. It is useful that von Vacano brings Latin American thinkers into debates about race in political theory, which are too often dominated by European and North American perspectives, yet it is not entirely clear how distinctive and particular to Latin America the synthetic view really is, as there are similar claims present in African American political thought, for example. Von Vacano may also be too sanguine about the possibilities inherent in the synthetic view and its capacity to serve as a model for contemporary multiethnic societies, especially given the strong criticisms of it by increasingly vocal indigenous and black movements in Latin America that argue that it served to legitimize (or at least coexisted with) racial hierarchy and discrimination.

Overall, this is a good book and the essays contained in it are well worth engaging. The volume does not quite live up to one of its stated aims of undertaking a systematic comparison of the concepts of race and ethnicity, however, as the majority of the essays (with the notable exception of those by Bernasconi and Alcoff) mainly discuss one or the other. Yet the great strength of the volume is that it offers an accessible introduction to a growing body of work by Latino philosophers who are engaged in sophisticated debates about race and ethnicity, while casting a broad net in terms of approaches and conclusions.