Few ideas are as potent, as easy to learn, and as difficult to forget as race. This course explores issues about race by disrupting "common sense" and by identifying its psychological and cultural dimensions. Much of the research on the psychological dimension seeks to explain racializing beliefs and attitudes in terms of general and familiar cognitive processes like perception, stereotyping, and category distortion. Research on the cultural dimension–typically conducted by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists–focuses on the way race figures in the regulation of power and resources, on its role in creating and sustaining economic inequity and political domination. The seminar adopts an integrative and comparative approach, examining differences and similarities in racial thinking across cultures and across historical periods, and comparing race with other important social categories, such as gender and class.