One could see an automatic relationship between biology and essentialism as an overarching, defining structure for the analysis of race within the social sciences; indeed, it is against a dominant “racial science” that the social sciences of race have stood since the beginning of the twentieth century. The struggle to be fought, hence, has been simple: while it was left to scientists to show the inaccuracy of racial science, social scientists took on the task of reshaping a concept not grounded in any biological reality, while analyzing a “social reality” that perdured. But the very simplicity of the project – the liberation of social science from the scientifically corrupt inheritance of the nineteenth century, an act of intellectual decolonization – has been repeatedly challenged. The contemporary resilience of race can be explained by the duration of its participation in both discursive practices and the social structure; in other words, its pervasiveness can be analyzed as a consequence of the fact that it has proved difficult to erase race from the way individuals, groups, and societies live, because it has participated too closely, and for too long, in social organization as much as in thought. What seems at first sight simple begins to appear as an insurmountable difficulty.