In contemporary political science research on American politics, the concept of race is typically framed as a factor that leads to deviations from the established pattern. For example, behavioralists are taught to “control” for race in multivariate models to understand how racial minorities vary from whites. In the profession, the study of race and ethnicity has been created as a separate section from other areas in U.S. politics. Although today’s scholars may be tempted to explain political science’s treatment of race as a function of the post–civil rights era and recent demographic change, we learn from Jessica Blatt’s Race and the Making of American Political Science that the discipline has long cultivated an orientation to seeing race as separate from politics. The practices and patterns we find in political science today find their roots in the early formation of the discipline.

This book largely focuses on the discipline’s creation and early years in the first half of the twentieth century. What Blatt points out is that the discipline originated as a professional enterprise during the same period that scholars were redefining how they understood race. Early thinking saw race as a concept interdependent with nation, culture, and peoplehood and used race as a justification for colonial rule. But with the rise of positivism and the scientific method, race became a useful site to develop typologies and to empirically test theories on intra- and intergroup variation. Blatt contextualizes for readers how race represented one of the trending scholarly topics at the turn of the century and shows that political scientists were eager to integrate these “innovations” into their own field. In this way, political science’s readiness to be viewed as a rigorous science made it continually vulnerable to the racism of the times. This has not changed since the discipline’s founding. Blatt opens and closes the book by discussing the popularity of genetic data. By juxtaposing today’s in vogue genetic data with eugenic typologies of the past, we glean lessons from Blatt’s historical analysis and can only hope that more political scientists will take greater caution from the discipline’s past before joining in on the latest academic trend.

But history tells us that we do not often learn lessons from our past. Unfortunately, many of the more harmful human tendencies—in this case, racist ideologies—reemerge in new eras. What was most striking about the book is the correspondence between the explanations offered by political scientists in defense of their work at the turn of the century and those heard today in contemporary debates about race. In contrast to today’s claims that racial polarization is becoming more virulent, Blatt shows us that there has actually been greater consistency in American political thought over time with respect to race, rather than growing extremism. Interestingly, Blatt documents the fixation on Reconstruction that characterizes a dominant share of early work published in the newly founded American Political Science Review. It makes sense that Reconstruction was a concern of political scientists given that the incorporation of newly enfranchised black voters was, in fact, an uncharted challenge for the federal government. Yet, much of the scholarly discussion focused on justifying why Reconstruction was destined to fail. As expected, arguments employing old-fashioned racism—for example, that blacks are incapable of participating in democratic governance—were cited for Reconstruction’s assumed failure.

Even more revealingly, however, political scientists sought to further clarify the imperative of institutions to uphold the rightful racial order. One analysis of the time highlighted by Blatt makes this clear: “lynching and vigilantism appeared in that historiography as yet another unfortunate consequence of the Reconstruction policies themselves. When the law was on the side of ‘unnatural’—that is, equal—relations between people of different races, it lost its hold on otherwise law-abiding whites” (p. 50). Thus, by focusing on white violence against blacks in response to Reconstruction, rather than the long-standing institutionalization of racial inequality itself, political scientists chose to characterize race as what Blatt calls a “pre-political” characteristic that had little relationship to the origin of America’s deeply oppressive and exclusionary political and social institutions.

But, even more importantly, we can see that Blatt’s analysis of Reconstruction could be substituted nearly verbatim for many analyses found in American politics in 2019. The choice to explain racial group conflict as separate from institutions continues to be the preferred mode of analysis. Thus, earlier quotes in this review could also be seen as modern explanations for recent political phenomena. For example, when considering the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, one often encounters explanations that view Trump’s rise as a product of the populism and xenophobia found within certain segments of the United States, rather than as the result of an entrenched racial order endemic in most American public policy and the nation’s history.

So although Blatt’s book ends with little to offer in the way of optimism that the profession will embrace race as a seminal and constitutive political feature of American politics, it at the same time offers insights into how political science came to view race and the role of race itself. By reading this book, new students entering the profession who want to focus on the study of race and ethnicity can become aware of the entrenched challenges they face in the profession while, at the same time, developing an orientation that will enable them to situate their work in contrast to much of the scholarly literature on this topic in American politics.