The 'Race' issue is an attempt to engage with some of these questions, to which there are no straightforward answers. In facing these needs, we experienced several unresolved tensions that, on the whole, seem to us to be productive. Perhaps the most strongly felt tension is the fact that the BS Production Team is entirely comprised of light-skinned folks. Race' is a social ideology with a history, and 'race' is a social construction rather than a human inevitability. But it is also more than these things.
Race is a lived dimension of human experience.
For all its constructedness, race is a dimension that shapes people's life chances, their self-understandings, their dreams and aspirations, and others' perceptions of them. Or rather, these distinctions are drawn and transformed in everyday practice and political agitation, and not simply in the minds of those who step back for a moment of reflection. We present here a set of articles that wrestle with the question of how race works, not to resolve the issue of how to think about race, but rather to explore how it already permeates so much of what we think about. Consequently, the essays in this issue take up 'race' in a number of different ways. Colette Gaiter, a visual artist, writes about the transit between racialized experience and representations of American technology, as embodied in the 1960s space program.