Racial categories matter because racial hierarchies matter: a commentary

New racial categories emerge with the progress of history, as new names reinterpret the existence and chronicle the insertion of demographic subgroups into a population. The analysis of categorical change is hardly unimportant work. However, we as researchers would be lax in our analyses if we did not understand that as racial categories change, so do racial hierarchies. To know what a group calls itself is only part of the story. Knowing the cultural, sociological and political meaning of the name, and how the category fits into a racialized - that is to say hierarchical - social structure, is just as important, if not more so.