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Discussions of complexity and change in matters of ethnoracial relations often obscure as much as they describe and illuminate. In part, this is so because such distinctions, racial ones in particular, are not now nor have they ever been fixed, static, and natural categories. They are instead malleable social constructions. In part, it is so because expressly ideological projects are typically embedded within the claims scholars make about ethnoracial patterns. Consider the assertion that hybridity and mixture are ending the relevance of race, or that global population flows, massive immigration, and "super-diversity" will, likewise, render notions of race passé. The trouble here is that the crossing of socially imposed lines of race and ethnicity, as well as contact among diverse peoples, has long characterized the human experience.

To characterize U.S. politics today as polarized is to state the obvious. Nevertheless, Barack Obama's election as the forty-fourth and first African American president of the United States in 2008 had an air of inevitability to it. The presidency of George W. Bush was at that point widely regarded as a profound failure. His administration had mishandled two on-going wars, brought us the nationally humbling debacle of hurricane Katrina, and took us to the brink of economic collapse. And thus the Democratic party nominee for president, who happened to be Black, was handily elected with 53% of the popular vote, carrying twenty-eight states and with some 365 electoral college votes.

Notions of race and the full-blown ideologies of racism that often accompany such social distinctions are not now nor have they ever been entirely static phenomena. Much, and arguably too much, social scientific research proceeds as if race and racism were relatively transparent, discrete, and static phenomena. Furthermore, such a perspective implies that lacking such transparency and fixity, race and racism have lost force and salience in social life. Such phenomena need not be fixed or simplex in order to profoundly affect how individuals in a society live or in order to be made the focus of important systematic social research. Yet, the complexity, pliability, and historical specificity of notions of race and of racism do perforce raise for us challenges of conceptual clarity and theoretical logic, and demand of us clear standards for the collection, deployment, and interpretation of evidence.