Race is one of the most elusive phenomena of social life. While we generally know it when we see it, it's not an easy concept to define. Social science literature has argued that race is a Western concept that emerged with the birth of modern imperialism, whether in the sixteenth century (the Age of Discovery) or the eighteenth century (the Age of Enlightenment). This book points out that there is a disjuncture between the way race is conceptualized in the social sciences and in recent natural science literature. In the view of some proponents of natural-scientific perspectives, race has a biological- and not just a purely social - dimension. The book argues that, to more fully understand what we mean by race, social scientists need to engage these new perspectives coming from genomics, medicine, and health policy. To be sure, the long, dark shadow of eugenics and the Nazi use of scientific racism cast a pall over the effort to understand the complicated relationship between social science and medical science understandings of race. While this book rejects pseudoscientific and hierarchical ways of looking at race and affirms that it is rooted in social grounds, it makes the claim that it is time to move beyond merely repeating the "race is a social construct" mantra. The chapters in this book consider three fundamental tensions in thinking about race: one between theories that see race as fixed and those that see it as malleable; a second between Western (especially US-based) and non-Western perspectives that decenter the US experience; and a third between sociopolitical and biomedical concepts of race. The book will help shed light on multiple contemporary concerns, such as the place of race in identity formation, ethno- political conflict, immigration policy, social justice, biomedical ethics, and the carceral state. "When social scientists and humanists fail to engage the discourses of the sciences, both scientists and the general public are left without the broader context of meaning that we all need in order to understand the stakes of urgent medical questions or of revelations about the human genome and what these might portend for our personal and shared futures. This collection of essays represents the promise of meaningful colloquy across the disciplines, bringing together some of our most gifted scholars to think about new ways to place science and the humanities in conversation, and to expand and complicate our understanding of race on both an historical and global scale."- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University, from the preface " Reconsidering Race is a thoughtful and illuminating collection of essays that should be required reading for students and teachers alike. In this engaging volume, leading scholars in the social sciences, humanities, and biology address how genetics are reconfiguring our notions of relatedness and difference and reshaping the meaning of race. They show what's at stake are not only claims about who we are but also the paths we may take for addressing the continuing problems of racial or ethnic inequalities."-Catherine Lee, author of Fictive Kinship "This estimable volume productively interrupts some of our most dearly-held convictions about the relationship between race and genetics, taking the genomics turn as an opportunity to rigorously reexamine and adapt existing social science paradigms."-Alondra Nelson, author of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome "What becomes clear from reading the chapters in this volume is just how important it is to employ a social constructivist lens to view the new narratives surrounding genomic science. So while the editors of Reconsidering Race maintain that the social sciences would do better to adapt their frameworks to encompass knowledge learned from genomics, the many rich contributions to this volume actually show that the hard sciences could stand to learn something from the social sciences." - Perspectives on Politics "[This] volume delivers quite effectively on its promise to broaden the conversation about race and science beyond Euro-American borders-a true strength of the collection." - American Journal of Human Biology The book provides views that go beyond US-centered or Western-based paradigms on race. Kazuko Suzuki is Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University and the author of Divided Fates: The State, Race, and Korean Immigrants' Adaptation in Japan and the United States , winner of the 2017 Book Award on Asia/Transnational from the Asia and Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association. Diego A. von Vacano is Associate Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University and the author of The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American/Hispanic Political Thought and The Art of Power: Machiavelli, Nietzsche and the Making of Aesthetic Political Theory .