Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word 'race' has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, race was already a weapon in the struggle between absolutism, aristocracy, and the middle class. The warfare spr…

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific r…

'We are at a juncture today that really is more of a threshold, even more of a watershed, than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was in 1941. We are currentl…

'Happens to be.' 'He happens to be black.' Like it's a fucking accident, you know. He happens to be black? Yes, he happens to be black. Ah, yes, yes, yes. He h…

You give me a set of conditions and I can produce racism in any society. You give me a different set of conditions and I can reduce racism. You give me a situa…