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A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America. By Jacqueline Jones. (New York: Basic Books, 2013. Pp. [xviii], 381. $34.50, ISBN 978-0-465-03670-7.)
In the introduction to A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America, Jacqueline Jones suggests that "people .. . utter the word 'race' with a casual thoughtlessness," a thoughtlessness that belies the complex and contradictory history of race-making and racism in the United States (p. x). Jones argues not only that racial categories are myths, but also that the very word race sustains the "myth" and "perpetuates" the false idea of racial difference (p. x). She seems to suggest that people who use the word race and its cognate racial categorizations actually perpetuate racism. At one point in the epilogue, Jones...