This book is not about race; it is about the belief in the existence of something called race. This distinction – between “race” and “belief in race” – forms the cornerstone of this book, and from it spring both our questions and our analyses. As a point of departure and basic hypothesis of our work, we argue that race exists only because people believe it exists. And while this distinction might seem pointless, we will show that, on the contrary, the confusion between the object and the belief in the object lies at the very heart of the difficulties encountered in the scholarly attempts to conceptualize race in the past century, and consequently in their failure to account for its persistence. The modalities of this double failure vary; however, we will try to read its deep consequences as one and the same: a resurgence, often hidden and sometimes unconscious, of the very racial essentialism that social science has sought to overcome. By keeping this distinction between race and the belief in race as the guiding line of our work, we will conduct a double project: a sociology of knowledge and a sociology of meaning.