This project is a philosophical analysis of the dominant concepts of race that prevail within contemporary American society. It is the claim of this book that four main concepts attempt to answer the question: what is race? The four concepts are racial essentialism, race as a social construct with objective status, racial nihilism, and race as an existential/phenomenological process. Each concept fails, however, in providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for a satisfactory concept of race, and thus, the project calls for a new conceptual framework for answering the question: what is race?