• Students of race want to know if we still live in a racist society, and what our racial order ought to look like. It is important to confront the basic assumptions we hold and the evaluative ideals according to which we assess our racial problems or even consider them to be "racial" to begin with.
• Our visions of what racial order "ought" to be tend to inform our ideas of what racial order "is." We can test our visions of the ideal racial order by putting them to practice, or at least by reasoning them through to their likely consequences.

2. What are the Goals?

• Color-blindness: Envisions a world in which race no longer serves as the basis for social stigmatization, discrimination, inequality, or injustice—a world in which race has disappeared. Color-blindness favors strictly race-neutral legal policies and more stringent enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. However, color-blindness fails to take into account many forms of racial discrimination, nor does it address the everyday forms of racism still pervasive in our society.
• Multiculturalism and Cosmopolitanism: Envisions a world in which racial diversity is fully accounted for and valued, recognizing the inherent dignity of all people. It encourages the acknowledgment and respect of racial differences as potentials sources of wisdom, good, and the hope of complete inclusion. However, while multiculturalism recognizes others’ diversity, it fails to account for becoming aware of one another’s problems and responding to them with just remedies.
• Racial Democracy: Envisions a world in which persons of all racial groups draw returns on societal resources commensurate with the value they themselves have added to them, recognizing the full humanity of all as contributors to the social whole. It proposes that we must begin by addressing racial inequality from actual experience, where racial injustice is rampant, and not from an imaginary, idealized world outside experience. A society marked by racial democracy would foster self-realization, flourishing, and growth by enabling people to develop their potentials and capacities.
• The goals for individual transformation must include racial intelligence, which can promote a social climate where people desire—and need—to know the best and latest on the pressing problems of the day, and it can lead to successful resolution of those problems.

3. How Do We Bring About Change?

• Each set of means toward racial reconstruction is interdependent with the others, and effective change in one or another alone cannot being about the desired ends.
• Change at the Individual Level requires an attitude of openness toward experience. Individuals can deliberately put themselves in different settings conducive to growth, and they can also take part in deliberate reflection to reconsider one’s previous modes of response to a situation.
• Four useful techniques can be deployed to invoke Change at the Interactional Level: (1) listening to people and taking their prejudices seriously, (2) posing authentic questions to invite respectful discussion in pursuit of the truth, (3) researching better alternatives to the prejudices people hold, and (4) by seeking a rational discussion rather than a debate you intend to win.
• Change at the Institutional Level includes domain-transcending means of effecting change, such as antidiscrimination laws; affirmative action; targeting racial groups for state aid under the aegis of nonracialist policies; and efforts to change the ways in which race is inscribed in institutions.
• Change at the Level of Collective Action involves participating in the time-honored methods of public protest in hopes of inventing a new kind of racial justice movement for the new times in which we live.

4. We Who Believe in Freedom

• Analysts refer to the 80/20 phenomenon as the common observation that roughly 80 percent of social change is brought about by 20 percent of the population. In other words, when a few impassioned citizens gather together around a single cause, the potential to move the world is in their hands.