Academics and activists concerned with race and racism have rightly coalesced around the sociological project to refute biologistic conceptions of race. By and large, our default position as teachers, writers and researchers is that race is a social construct. However, the deconstruction of race and its claims to theoretical intelligibility has also left us buckling under the weight of scare quotes, prefixes, suffixes, qualifiers and euphemisms. Why has race been singled out in this way? In this ostensibly "post-racial" context, how can race-conscious scholars (to use Leonardo's term) speak not just of racism or racialization but of race itself in the work that we do? These are pedagogic questions because pedagogy is not simply a synonym for teaching and learning styles; it is also the study of connections between teaching and learning and wider social structures, cultural shifts and intellectual conditions. This paper draws upon the work of Gilroy, Winant, Leonardo and Pollock to argue the value of representing race as a central social practice ordered by shifting boundaries, tools and categories. The paper takes issue with post-racial positions and suggests that, while race's false dimensions need to be understood, race is not simply something to be overcome. A racial analysis that incorporates imaginative and material lenses is the required tool for beginning to dismantle real and damaging racial practices. We are post-racial in having moved beyond pseudo-genetic notions of race; however, we are not "post-racial" "per se". Therefore we must make creative use of the paradox of race-conscious scholarship: working both with and against conceptual tools that have yet to be effectively replaced.