The post--civil rights era perspective of many scientists and scholarswas that race was nothing more than a social construction. Recently, however, therelevance of race as a social, legal, and medical category has been reinvigorated byscience, especially by discoveries in genetics. Although in 2000 the Human GenomeProject reported that humans shared 99.9 percent of their genetic code, scientistssoon began to argue that the degree of variation was actually greater than this, andthat this variation maps naturally onto conventional categories of race. In thecontext of this rejuvenated biology of race, the contributors to What's the Use ofRace? investigate whether race can be a category of analysis without reinforcing itas a basis for discrimination. Can policies that aim to alleviate inequalityinadvertently increase it by reifying race differences? The essays focus oncontemporary questions at the cutting edge of genetics and governance, examiningthem from the perspectives of law, science, and medicine. The book follows the useof race in three domains of governance: ruling, knowing, and caring. Contributorsfirst examine the use of race and genetics in the courtroom, law enforcement, andscientific oversight; then explore the ways that race becomes, implicitly orexplicitly, part of the genomic science that attempts to address human diversity;and finally investigate how race is used to understand and act on inequities inhealth and disease. Answering these questions is essential for setting policies forbiology and citizenship in the twenty-first century.