Reviewed by Nancy Raquel Mirabal | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.3

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Reviewed by Nancy Raquel Mirabal | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity.* Edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. xii + 288 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
In what is sure to be an important contribution to the debates concerning African American and Latina/o identity and community formation, the philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia has edited an anthology that uncovers and ultimately complicates our understanding of how we think about race and ethnicity in the United States. This anthology is particularly effective because Gracia is not content to have the contributors focus on the multiple, seemingly random, and imprecise elements of U.S. identity configurations. Rather, he emphasizes four approaches taken by his contributors: replacing race with ethnicity; replacing race with the concept of racial identity; combining race and ethnicity either in the concepts of ethnic race or racial ethnicity; and lastly, keeping race and ethnicity separate, but developing new ways of conceiving them (p. 4).	1
The contributors to this anthology do well to avoid rehashing past debates concerning the validity of one term over the other, but instead pursue exploratory, even experimental approaches to rethinking questions of race and ethnicity. Gracia has elicited articles that speak to the meanings of such imprecise identities and their roles in challenging how we imagine, examine, and apply our conceptions of race and ethnicity depending on particular realms or spaces. After a close reading, Gracia evidently poses the title question not as a challenge but as a realization that despite the years of research and publications, race and ethnicity continue to be "slippery concepts" that change regardless of the amount of intellectual production devoted to them.	. . .

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