This article delineates how race has been undertheorized in research on the educational experiences and outcomes of Blacks. The authors identify two dominant traditions by which researchers have invoked race (i.e., as culture and as a variable) and outline their conceptual limitations. They analyze how these traditions mask the heterogeneity of the Black experience, underanalyze institutionalized productions of race and racial discrimination, and confound causes and effects in estimating when and how race is "significant." The authors acknowledge the contributions of more recent scholarship and discuss how future studies of Black achievement might develop more sophisticated conceptualizations of race to inform more rigorous methodological examinations of how, when, and why Black students perform in school as they do. (Contains 8 notes.)