I’ve often heard it said that people at Whitman don’t talk about race. It is quite true that an impoverished lexicon for discussions of race and racism exists at our institution, but this is not unique to Whitman—it is a generalized problem typifying political discourse in the United States, in which "race" surfaces to diagnose affective extremity (e.g., racial hatred), suspicious mobilizations of history (e.g., race-baiting) or demographic minoritization (e.g. “the Hispanic vote”). No wonder, then, that even faculty struggle to conceptually separate "race" (the historically contingent, political phenomenon through which categorical differences are ascribed to bodies) from "racism" (the creation or reproduction of structures of domination based on essentialized racial categories).