In A Realist Metaphysics of Race: A Context-Sensitive, Short-Term Retentionist, Long-Term Revisionist Approach, Jeremy Pierce defends a social kind view of racial categories. On this view, the biological features we use to classify people racially do not make races natural kinds. Rather, races exist because of contingent social practices, single out certain groups of people as races, give them social importance, and allow us to name them as races. Pierce also identifies several kinds of context-sensitivity as central to how racial categorization works and argues that we need racial categories to identify problems in how our racial constructions are formed, including the harmful effects of racial constructions. Hence, rather than seeking to eliminate such categories, Pierce argues that we should also make efforts to change the conditions that generate their problematic elements, with an eye toward retaining only the unproblematic aspects. A Realist Metaphysics of Race contains insights relevant not just to professional philosophers in metaphysics, philosophy of race, social philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, but also to students and scholars working in sociology, biology, anthropology, ethnic studies, and political science.

"Pierce . . . discusses how more recent ways of classifying people racially are incompatible with the one-drop rule and that rule's dependence on a clear-cut U.S. black-white binary. . . .I respect Pierce for hoping that future generations can accomplish some measure of racial justice. I would recommend this book to analytic metaphysicians, philosophers of race, philosophers of biology, philosophers of language, and anyone else who might be interested in how contemporary analytic metaphysics can help us conceive of race and how racial classifications work. . . .Pierce's philosophical prose gracefully weaves together . . . apparently disparate topics." - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews