Arguing That Racism is the best understood as exclusionary relations of power rather than simply as hateful expressions, David Theo Goldberg analyzes contemporary expressions of race and racism. He engages in political economy, culture, and everyday material life against a background analysis of profound demographic shifts and changing class formation and relations.

Arguing that racism is best understood as exclusionary relations of power, David Theo Goldberg traces the history of changing racial categories over two hundred years of US census-taking and uses this framework to discuss the new black public intellectuals, race and the law in the wake of the O.J. Simpson verdict, relations between Blacks and Jews and affirmative action.
By invoking a comparative and international framework in its discussions of race, "Race Rules" heralds the next wave of writing about race and moves discussions about race forward as few other books recently have.