Terminological difficulties beset the whole field of race relations and, particularly, the study of racial discourse. Before setting out to describe the characteristics of British political discourse about race, I shall try to explain the meaning of ‘race’, ‘racism’, ‘racialism’, ‘racist’, and ‘racialist’. I shall examine in detail the use of the word ‘racism’ as this description has been widely applied to the kind of things people say about race. Because of a general vagueness and ambiguity in the meaning of all these terms, the exercise requires a great deal of arbitrary legislation, influenced in part by the needs of the subsequent study. In the course of analysis, various confusions, lurking in everyday and previous social scientific usage, are revealed. It should be stressed, however, that the whole area is a semantic ‘battlefield’, in which Wittgenstein's analogy of word tools does not come amiss. But the social and political ramifications of ‘category legislation’ are more akin to the deployment of tanks and barbed wire than to the use of the hammer, pliers, and saw of Wittgenstein's homely tool-box. The use of words has political significance: their application in social context reveals something of a person's scheme for ordering, understanding, and acting in his world.

The reality of race consists in the first instance of perceivable characteristics of groups of people. ‘Perceivable’ in this context means ‘capable of being perceived’ (‘perceived’ = ‘made available to the senses’).