The concept of racial identity – and, particularly in the United States, black racial identity – is ubiquitous in scholarly work on race in the social sciences and the humanities as well as in everyday political discourse. Several social scientists, however, have generally questioned the utility of the concept of “identity,” racial or otherwise, for social analysis. Scholars such as Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper argue that the concept is used to capture a variety of confusing and sometimes contradictory clusters of meanings. They would have social scientists abandon the term for a range of more precise terms. Some philosophers have also questioned the analytical, moral, and political utility of both the general concept of identity and the more specific concept of black identity. Scholars such as Tommie Shelby, for example, call for the abandonment of the notion of a “collective black identity” in order to place the project of building philosophically liberal and politically progressive black solidarity on stronger philosophical, political, and moral grounds.