The Race Illusion: On the Reality of Racialization and the Myth of Race. A.Hochman, 2025. Oxford, Oxford University Press. xiv + 224 pp, $40 (hb)

In The Race Illusion, Adam Hochman argues that race is not real, but that racialization is.That is, he argues for anti-realism about race and a view he calls 'reconstructionist anti-realism': 'we should reconstruct or reform our understanding of the groups believed to be races.The view says that the groups understood to be races are actually racialized groups' (p.137).His strategy in the book is to argue, first, that race is not a biological reality, and second, that race is not a social reality.The position that 'races aren't real but racialized groups are' is not new in the philosophy of race.But Hochman's understanding of racialization and his arguments against biological and social realist views of race are, in many instances, novel.Hochman states that while the book is appropriate for 'the public, students, and a broad range of specialists' (p.xiv), it is 'comprehensive' (p.xiv), 'covering all the major metaphysical positions about race' (p.69).The book certainly covers an impressive amount of ground in around 200 pages.Hochman begins by offering a stipulative definition of race: 'a race is a major biological group and lineage formed due to reproductive isolation, in which membership is transmitted through biological descent' (p.4).He says that this definition is the most useful for carving out 'a unique place in conceptual space and makes a substantive claim about human biological diversity and history' (p.5).Additionally, he says that this definition makes it easy to distinguish 'the thing that many people falsely believe to be real ("race") and what is actually real (racialized individuals, groups, social structures, and racism)' (p.5).Part 1 (Chapters 1-3) argues against biological theories of race.Hochman addresses traditional biological views (typically essentialist and racist) and contemporary ones (non-essentialist, non-racist).Among the biological views considered are those that take races to be subspecies, populations, morphological groups, genetic clusters, biologically real folk categories, inbred lineages, ecotypes, and basic kinds.Readers interested in these specific proposals are encouraged to look at the details of Hochman's discussion, as he skillfully navigates some complicated scientific ideas for readers not familiar with the science.These chapters were quite enjoyable to read.We need not delve into the details here to understand Hochman's main concern with biological approaches to race.He provides three conditions, which if met by a theory of biological race should render the theory a 'candidate for elimination':1.The theory proposes a radical change in definition of 'race', 2. The theory trivializes the postulated kind, and 3.The target phenomenon is better described by another term, rendering the old posit superfluous.(pp.[23][24][25]