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This text explores what racial categories mean to the American public and how these meanings are reinforced by anthropology, popular culture and the law. Focusing on the period between two Supreme Court decisions - Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) and Brown vs Board of Education (1954) - the author shows how racial categories change over time. The text presents a picture of the relationships between specific African-American and white scholars, who orchestrated a paradigm shift within the social sciences from ideas based on Social Darwinism to those based on cultural relativism. It should demonstrate that the greatest impact on the way the law codifies racial differences has been made by organizations such as the NAACP, which appropiated the new social science to exploit the politics of the Cold War.