Race is learned as practical know-how, not as explicit rules.

Evidence

We learn race in the places we live not as rules, but as habits—as a kind of general know-how that enables us to get about. We learn that there are places where they live and places where we shouldn’t go. In fact, I had already been habituated to race at eight years old, because I knew we were moving not to a nicer part of town, but to the “white side” of town. Getting called a nigger, painful as it was, was just the icing on the cake. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 148

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies racial habits as a kind of tacit know-how or disposition, not rule-following — key to why they’re hard to unlearn.
• XREF: The know-how framing parallels Bourdieu’s habitus; a useful theoretical referent for the reader’s precise definition of racial habits.