The concept of race as a rough division of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) has a long and complicated history. The word race itself is modern and was used in the sense of "nation, ethnic group" during the 16th to 19th centuries and acquired its modern meaning in the field of physical anthropology only from the mid-19th century.

Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race.

Political theorists have collectively failed to arrive at a coherent and consistent definition of the term "race". Terms such as "negro", "white", "African", "Asian", "black", are often provided without an accompanying explanation or justification for their usage. Typical "histories" of "racism" tend to betray a general incapacity to visualize or bring to life the non-racialist or pre-racialist character of societies in the "Old World". Moreover, political psychologists that do address "racism" tend to contextualize this phenomenon using passively-constructed language that presents scenarios of an unfortunate racist political behavior motivated by antipathy.

In response, this book advances the following claims:

(a) before the advent of "modern racism", around the globe, and in the geographic spaces of "western Eurasia", the range of "morphological" characteristics was heterogeneous and reflected the cyclical explorations, invasions, and colonization from peoples who were home to what is now known as "Africa", the "Near East", and "Asia" into those spaces;

(b) the term "race" has undergone specific and radically transformative phases in which its meanings have been re-constituted from mere "kinship" to "meta- ancestry", "morphology", "anthropology" and "bio-genetics";

(c) the contemporary meaning of "race" is best conceptualized as a mosaic of constructed micro-differences (e.g. social relations, cognitive-linguistic framework, appearance, ancestry, and self- identification) reified as the markers of intrinsic "racial" distinction, which the subject measures according to a weighted-scale that she uses to ultimately assign self, group, and other membership in one (or more) "racial" group(s);

(d) racial power entails a nexus of power-knowledge whereby authority is enabled to exercise political power to confer greater enabled agency to the social agent by discourses developed by credentialed "experts" working within a field of authoritative knowledge that objectifies that social agent as occupying a subject position that is imbued with empowerment.