Welcome to What Is Racial Difference? This is a site for asking what race consists of: is it color? culture? geography? This is a site for asking what race does: does it produce division and strife? define and maintain communities? create and uphold structures of inequality? provide a platform for passing down rituals and values? This is a site for examining how race functions in daily life: does race affect a person’s perception of herself? her educational decisions? his professional performance, whether positively or negatively? This is a site for reflecting on where race operates: is race with us at the grocery store? at the academic conference?

Contributors include students in Professor Cord Whitaker’s What Is Racial Difference? [English 291] at Wellesley College and professional scholars who think about race from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: English, French, Spanish, History, Biology, Genetics, Psychology, Anthropology, Political Science, etc.

To answer ‘What is race?’ is to deal with a vast and varied array of evidence and a variety of analytical approaches that varies even more. This blog’s objective is to bring evidence and approaches—especially those that may be less well known—to light and into conversation.

In order to for this site to achieve its goals, we need contributions from readers like you! If you have an idea for a post, please tweet @ProfCWhit or email at cord.whitaker(at)wellesley.edu.