It's the cousin of the condition called the deadlock. In a deadlock, two or more processes vie for temporary ownership of a resource, and the first one of them gets it and never relinquishes it to the other processes because the first one has been waiting for the other ones to get it in the first place effectively bringing everything to a dead lock / halt.

A race condition is similar, two or more processes race to obtain an important resource, and this is a resource that can only be used reliably by one thing at once. And somehow, through some blooper, two or more processes grab hold of this resource and very unpredictable things begin to occur, because they are both attempting to mess with this resource without knowing something else is also messing with it.