As Ward Connerly prepares initiatives to abolish race-based affirmative action in five more states, New America Foundation fellow Gregory Rodriguez, no fan of Connerly's movement, has published an eye-opening book that nonetheless reinforces deep questions about the nation's racial assumptions and categories.

Connerly is the Sacramento businessman and ex-regent of the University of California who drove the successful campaigns overturning race-based preference policies in public education, employment and contracting in California, Washington and Michigan. He's now planning similar campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Connerly's most notable failure was the overwhelming defeat of California's Proposition 54 in 2003, which would have prohibited the use of official racial categories in all instances where they were not required by federal law and not essential to public safety. Those categories, Connerly said, legitimized racial divisions that were long obsolete.

Rodriguez's book, "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America" raises similar questions but folds them into a compelling, extensively documented history, going back to the conquistadors, of the consequences of the Mexican racial and cultural synthesis called mestizaje – the mixing of Spaniard and Indian. ...

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