There is a tendency in political science to see identities as given and fixed. They are placed in equations and used to predict things, but the content of those identities and our normative understanding of them remain a mystery. For that reason, Ethics Along the Color Line and The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity are essential books both for political theorists and those working in other fields of political science. Both add analytical rigor to our use of race as social scientists and implore us to keep in mind normative questions as we explore the contours and meanings of race as a sociopolitical construct.

Ethics Along the Color Line, as a work of analytical philosophy, challenges us to explore the ethical and analytical uses of racial identity. The book is most concerned with first intervening in debates about the nature of racial identities and then exploring if those debates have consequences for normative uses of race for political and social organization. Anna Stubblefield takes up what she refers to as descriptive arguments, largely drawing upon classical works from W. E. B. DuBois and more contemporary works of Charles Mills and Lucius Outlaw, in order to challenge interventions of authors such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Gilroy who argue that race is an imagined phenomenon and a poor ethical basis for developing group action and solidarity. By situating this discussion within the context of social scientific works that demonstrate the quotidian manifestations of race, Stubblefield argues that race matters as a category of experience and analysis. Further, by examining the development of racial identities in the U.S. and international contexts, she forces us to engage white racial identity as both an analytical and normative context. This book moves beyond the tendency to study race as white racial attitudes and forwards a perspective whereby the identities and attitudes of whites and racial minorities are all considered part of the explanatory framework.

Although Stubblefield sides with Outlaw—who agrees that race is quite real in the everyday experience of individuals and groups—she argues that this does not necessarily guarantee the prescriptive potential of race to solve problems of justice and inequality in society. Thus, she seeks to move beyond the debate between Outlaw and Appiah by suggesting a division between descriptive and prescriptive accounts of race. While the author spends the majority of the book discussing the descriptive nature of race, her innovation is primarily in the prescriptive parts. Here, she argues that it is an ethical necessity to take race into account, and this is best served by thinking of the “races” as “families.” She finds that thinking of races in this way invokes an ethic of care, a responsibility for those within the family, and a recognition of the conditions and responsibilities to those outside the family. Therefore, for her it is ethical for blacks to act out of a feeling of racial solidarity; and in order to achieve racial justice, whites must recognize their racial group interests and their obligation to blacks and other minorities as members outside their family.

I agree with this argument but wish Stubblefield had spent more time developing it. Her analogy depends upon the belief that those in families recognize some responsibility to those outside the family. But such responsibility is not necessarily built into the conception of family, which, as noted, can easily degenerate into forms of exclusion. Perhaps it is here where the differences between the disciplines of political science and analytical philosophy are most evident. For political scientists, the theoretical positioning on the nature of race in contemporary societies is far more compelling than the vignettes used to form the foundation for the normative argument.

The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity is much more familiar as a work of political science coming out of the field of political theory. Bruce Baum also takes aim at Paul Gilroy's Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (2001). Gilroy argues that it is unethical to use race as a basis for social scientific analysis or political action. Baum states: “People who have been racialized as Caucasians must acknowledge our historically racialized identities as Caucasian—along with the social and material advantages it entails—even as we work with others to end the myth of a ‘Caucasian race’” (p. 19). Like Stubblefield, Baum argues that excavating the historical manifestations and complex meanings of racial categories is the first step toward a recognition of the role of race in organizing modern societies.

By tracking the historical development of the conception of Caucasianness and race itself, Baum seeks to understand the sociopolitical “work” that race has done in organizing modernity. Although he begins with the Middle Ages and moves to the defeat of the Moors in Spain, the Enlightenment looms large in his account, for during this period, biblical discourses about race were ultimately replaced by a discourse of racial science used to justify the projects of colonialism and the transatlantic trade in human beings. Like Charles Mills, Baum argues that Enlightenment thinkers like Locke and Kant are themselves implicated in the construction of certain groups (specifically people of African descent and indigenous peoples) as racial others deemed outside the Enlightenment project.

Baum tracks the interplay between European thought and the development of racial policies in the United States. He argues that between 1840 and 1940, there is a decline in the sense of a unitary Caucasian race, which can be classified as a “fall.” This is reflected in U.S. immigration policies and continental racial science, and it is interrupted only by the rise of Nazi racial science and the rehabilitation of a conception of the Caucasian race. However, this points to a potential alternative story that is not developed because of the scope of the book.

Baum's work focuses almost exclusively on continental Europe and the United States. The variety of race concepts employed through varied practices of chattel slavery and colonialism is thus not captured. His book sometimes reads as if the continental thought inevitably manifested itself in the particular set of racial formations that come to characterize the history of U.S. racial politics. However, it is worth noting that British, Spanish, Portuguese, and German practices varied widely around the globe and that there were salient differences in racialization in regions within the United States. Thus, where Baum notes the “fall” of the Caucasian race, it is perhaps the case that there always existed multiple interpretations or uses of similar strands of racial thought and that what he is tracking is which strand became dominant at various points in time in one particular national context. That being said, the general arch of the story is well documented. He ably connects the development of the U.S. postcolonial nation to the ongoing dialogue and development of race science occurring in Europe. A further project would have been to engage these developments in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, Africa, and Australia, as well as in the United States and Europe. But it is perhaps unfair to ask an author to so expand the scope of the book, though we could gain more analytical clarity by a clearer formulation.

Baum's point is that the Caucasian race, racial science, and Enlightenment thinking are inherently racial projects built to exclude a range of groups. By examining the development of the conception of the Caucasian race, the author reveals how that identity functions as a powerful myth that organizes social, political, and economic interactions. Thus, he concludes that we must be more cognizant of the myth itself in order to understand the role race plays in contemporary U.S. society.

While these two books focus on the work of political theorists, such as Hawley Fogg-Davis, Mills, Michael Hanchard, and Tommie Shelby, and those in the field of American political development, such as Ira Katznelson, Cathy Cohen, Paul Frymer, Jennifer Hochschild, Alvin Tilley, Michael Dawson, and Rogers Smith, it is important for those from other subfields to begin to incorporate the key points. The works of Stubblefield and Baum and the others mentioned cause us to place racial identities themselves at issue and call on us to deploy analytical and normative tools to assess those identities in the construction of modern societies. The insights of these two works add a needed dimension to the study of race in political science that I hope scholars beyond the field of theory will take to heart.