The Race Illusion: On the Reality of Racialization and the Myth of Race

Is race real? Are there human races? In the contemporary debate about the metaphysics and ontology of race, the most common answer is yes. Most people are racial realists, but they disagree about whether race is defined biologically—by reference to ancestry, genetics, etc.—or socially—by reference to culture, politics, etc. Adam Hochman bucks the recent realist trend in the metaphysics of race. He argues that there are no human races. Instead, he defends a thoroughgoing, and formidable, anti-realist account of race that he calls reconstructionist anti-realism. In my view, Hochman has provided the most convincing case for racial anti-realism since the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and Naomi Zack in the early 1990s. (This is no small accomplishment!) The book makes a case for racial anti-realism that should be taken seriously for years to come.

Hochman divides the book into two parts. In Part I, he argues against biological realism. In Part II, he argues against social realism and considers some consequences of his anti-realist account. I will summarize each part and offer a few critical observations.

In Part I of the book, Hochman defines, and argues against, increasingly sophisticated versions of the biological theory of race. In Chapter 1, he considers the traditional view that races are human populations, where a population is a group of individuals that occupy a certain area, have shared ancestry, and are likely to have shared descendants. Hochman notes several problems with this view, but I will focus on two. First, the populations view appears to change the subject; there are many human populations that we would not consider races. Second, the populations view makes races scientifically trivial; such a notion of race would not tell us anything interesting about human biological diversity. Overall, Hochman dispatches these traditional views before moving on to more serious competing philosophical views in Chapter 2.

There, he argues against the most robust contemporary biological theory of race—the genetic cluster theory of race as articulated by Quayshawn Spencer. Spencer argues that human races can have a scientifically legitimate biological basis if we think of them as genetic clusters. Specifically, we think of racial concepts as picking out genetic clusters. Against Spencer, Hochman argues that Spencer's theory faces the same problems as traditional biological theories of race. For example, Hochman argues that Spencer's theory changes the topic, as genetic clusters give rise to different races than the ones that ordinary people will recognize. Hochman also thinks the view trivializes the notion of race, given that there are many genetic clusters. In Chapter 3, Hochman discusses several more theories of race by major figures in this area—Joshua Glasgow, Michael Hardimon, and Philip Kitcher—and argues that these views fail for similar reasons.

Hochman’s discussion of biological theories of race is comprehensive, rigorous, and compelling. He truly attempts to confront every major view in the area, and he gives substantive, extensive arguments against each biological account. While anti-realists have argued against biological theorists in the past, this book tackles the biological theories that have been offered most recently. This matters because it is tempting to think that recent advances in biology count in favor of biological realism. Hochman’s point is that biological realism still fails as a metaphysical thesis, despite what advances in genetic sequencing and mapping there might be. One worry about Hochman’s arguments, however, is that they feel a bit too familiar. While Hochman does not simply repeat existing arguments, it is true that the kinds of arguments he deploys against the biological theorist are well known. This is not to say that his arguments are unimportant. It is only to say that his arguments may not persuade people who are broadly familiar with the existing literature.

In Part II of the book, Hochman argues against social realism about race. On this view, racial kinds are social kinds, united by a common culture, recognition, or social structure. In Chapter 4, Hochman's main issue with social theories of race is that they have what he calls an inflation problem. If we define race by reference to the social world, then we may end up inflating the concept of race. The clearest example of this is the distinction between race and ethnicity. The idea of an ethnic group includes factors surrounding shared ancestry and appearance, on the one hand, and culture, on the other. If races are essentially social, however, ethnic groups will count as racial groups because they include elements of culture and social recognition. Hochman criticizes Ásta's conferralist account of race for different reasons. Ásta argues that we confer racial properties onto individuals in contexts. Hochman thinks this kind of view makes racial properties come too easily. To use his example: the fact that we perceive someone as a witch does not make them a witch. Similarly, thinking that races are real should not make it so. Hochman discusses other social realist accounts of race, including Chike Jeffers’s cultural account of race and phenomenological approaches to race.

Hochman's case against social realism was less persuasive to me than his criticisms of biological realism. This is because his arguments seemed to be against social constructionism, in general, not specifically against social constructionism in the metaphysics of race. The clearest example of this is his criticism of Ásta's conferralist theory. According to conferralism, we socially construct the world by socially conferring properties onto groups and individuals. Hochman criticizes conferralism because it seems to rule out the possibility of major error about the social world; surely the world does not have whatever properties we think it does. This is a fair critique, but (a) it is not unique to the metaphysics of race, and (b) there are more general theories of social construction—ones that appeal to essences, grounding, anchoring, truthmaking, and so on—that respond to it.

There are other signs that Hochman has issues with social constructionism, more generally. He thinks that the notion of social construction is radically ambiguous, to the point of “meaningless” (95). This too is a fair criticism, but it also seems like a more general point. Or at least, I wanted to see more argument for these claims. His critique of biological realism is almost twice as long as the critique of social realism, but, as far as I can tell, social realism is the most dominant position within social ontology.

Chapters 1-4 offer arguments against biological and social realist theories of race. Hochman considers, and rejects, the possibility of a purely negative metaphysical project. He calls unreconstructed anti-realism the view that races do not exist, and we do not need an alternative to race concepts. This view seems straightforward for anti-realists; if there are no races, then there is nothing further we need to explain. Hochman rejects this view because he thinks it is both metaphysically incomplete and “dangerous” (137).

The view is incomplete because it overlooks a non-trivial fact about the metaphysics of race: namely, that racialized groups and racialization exist. The view is dangerous because it leaves us without the resources to identify racism and historical racial injustices. The unreconstructed anti-realist says there are no races. But if there are no races, how do we explain interpersonal and institutional racism? Hochman thinks anti-realism is more plausible if we have good answers to such questions.

To this end, he defends reconstructionist anti-realism, which says that we should reform our understanding of groups that are believed to constitute races. Specifically, instead of talking about races, we would be better off talking about racialized groups and racialization. Hochman defines racialization as the process by which a group comes to be understood as a biological race. Racialized groups are the products of racialization. Hochman then gives a brief account of the advantages of his reconstructionist picture. First, he notes that the concept of racialization, unlike the concept of race, is a process concept; we must think of racialization as something that is done to us by others, while race is typically understood as who we are, biologically or socially. Second, he argues that the appeal to racialization would also be more advantageous when thinking about biomedical contexts. Race realists tend to attribute certain differences in the health of populations to race. The problem is that this kind of attribution can be dangerous, as people tend to think of race as genetic. If we talk about disparate health impacts in terms of racialized groups and racialization, it is harder to make this kind of mistake.

I found the discussion of racialization and racialized groups informative and fruitful. The chapter was informative because it explains how the anti-realist seeks to fill the explanatory gap that they are usually accused of being unable to fill. (“If there are no races, how could there be racism?”) It is fruitful because it asks new, and probably more interesting, questions within the metaphysics of race. For example, Hochman thinks we need a concept of racialization, but we should not bother with a theory of racialization. Insofar as I understand the dialectic, I disagree. Metaphysicians need theories of racialization because racialization often seems more explanatory than race. Independently of who is right about this matter, it seems to be a point of disagreement that pushes the metaphysics of race toward new topics. This is a good thing.

I was also particularly impressed with the way that Hochman integrated the metaphysics of race with normative concerns about racism and racial injustice. In (what I call) critical social ontology, one does metaphysics with an eye toward critiquing or addressing social injustice. Of course, critical social ontology has a danger of being done poorly; either we confuse metaphysics and politics, or we do both badly. Hochman’s case for reconstructionist anti-realism is clear about the distinction between metaphysics and value theory; it is metaphysically rigorous, and the recommendations seem practically sensible. It is hard to balance normative matters and social metaphysics, but Hochman succeeds in this task.

Adam Hochman’s The Race Illusion does not settle the debate on racial realism. (In philosophy, debates are never settled!) However, it does constitute the definitive case for racial anti-realism. If you are serious about the metaphysics of race, you should read this book.

REFERENCES

Ásta. Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race, and Other Social Categories. Studies in Feminist Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2018.

Ásta. “Critical Social Metaphysics: Metaphysics for Liberation and Social Science and Theory.” Journal of Social Ontology 11, no. 1 (2025): 264–85.

Epstein, Brian. The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences. Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Griffith, Aaron M. “Social Construction and Grounding.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97, no. 2 (2018): 393–409.

Passinsky, Asya. “Norm and Object: A Normative Hylomorphic Theory of Social Objects.” Philosopher’s Imprint 21, no. 25 (2021).

Richardson, Kevin. “Critical Social Ontology.” Synthese 201, no. 6 (2023): 204.

Richardson, Kevin. “The Spatial Theory of Race.” Philosophia, ahead of print, April 20, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-026-00991-5.

See Ásta (2018).

For example, see Epstein (2015), Griffith (2018), and Passinsky (2021).

I discuss this in Richardson (2026).

See Richardson (2023) and Ásta (2025).