Race condition
Race conditions arise in software when an application depends on the sequence or timing of processes or threads for it to operate properly. As with electronics, there are critical race conditions that result in invalid execution and bugs. Critical race conditions often happen when the processes or threads depend on some shared state. Operations upon shared states are critical sections that must be mutually exclusive. Failure to obey this rule opens up the possibility of corrupting the shared state.
Historical race concepts
In the 1979 preface to "Blackness: Text and Pretext", Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes the elusive element of "blackness" in Afro-American literature as lacking an "essence", defined instead "by a network of relations that form a particular aesthetic unity" (p. 162). Continuing his poststructuralist-inflected negation of blackness as an essence, in his 1985 introduction to a special issue of the journal "Critical Inquiry", Gates goes even further, calling race itself a "dangerous trope" (p. 5). He argues that "race has become a trope of the ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures, linguistic groups, or adherents of specific belief systems which — more often than not — also have fundamentally opposed economic interests" (p. 5).