The development of the sociology of race in America did not occur in a vacuum. It was shaped from the beginning by the pre-existing racial science of the nineteenth century, which is frequently referred to as “scientific racism.” Opposition to scientific racism and its emphasis on biology and nature has set the fundamental terms on which “race” has been queried over the last one hundred years in American sociology. In epistemological terms, this opposition is simple enough: it involves an exchange of objects, biology (or nature) for society. Yet, as an example that confirms the psychoanalytic law of the return of the repressed, biological (i.e., essentialist) notions have invariably found their way back into putatively sociological conceptions of race. This chapter traces both the exchange of objects in the study of race and the return of a repressed racial nature in sociological arguments about race that form a distinctive style of thought.