MY TOPIC IS TAXONOMY: THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF CLASSIFYING living organisms, in this case human beings, into discrete categories. (1) My examples, verbal and visual, come from the realm of the imagination--from literature, science, and visual imagery as well as from scholarship--for the theories of race come more from cultural imagination than biological fact. This is a discourse history, not an event history, and its question asks for an answer from the conceptual rather than the behavioral realm. I am posing a question about meaning.

The taxonomy here relates to the white races--yes, white, the usually unraced race. Because American history bulges with analyses of ...