“Malcomson tracks with a Melvillean intensity the 'unbidden yet unstoppable' evolution of racial categorization in the United States. Close readings of history tease out the manifold ironies and contradictions of the subject.” —The New Yorker

“Full of swift insights . . . The chapters speed by . . . like a crash course given by a brilliant teacher.” —Daniel Blue, The San Francisco Chronicle

“This is cultural history written as a nation's collective memoir. Malcomson's ambitious narrative, spanning two centuries of an idea, is bound to become a cornerstone of the new American historiography.” —Talk

“This book should be read with deliberation, for it invites serious reflection of a kind that for the fair-minded, rational person can only be liberating.” —John C. Walter, Seattle Times

“The best single history of race in America in many years, the one to read if you only have time for one book on the subject.” —David L. Chappell, Newsday

“Explosive and exhilarating . . . Carried through with an ardor and interpretive brilliance that rivals James Baldwin . . . Malcomson has set a new standard of open, honest dialogue on race in America.” —Orlando Patterson, The New York Times Book Review

“Malcomson's accounts of how whites' myths of racial belonging were woven – out of encounters with Indians in forests primeval, with blacks on African coasts and Virginia riverbanks and with Mexicans in the often-fatuous deliberations of the California Constitutional Convention of 1849--are moral without moralizing, intimate without self-pity or self-importance . . . The result is a book almost biblical . . . with commanding flights of moral imagination and poetry.” —Jim Sleeper, Los Angeles Times