Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

Racist concepts do considerable work in political and economic life; but, if they were merely an appendage of politics and economics, without intimate roots in other phases of life, their persuasiveness would accordingly diminish.

Everyone has skin color, but not everyone’s skin color counts as race, let alone as evidence of criminal

Disguised as race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather than something racists do.

If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we ourselves choose to do now.