Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

“Race” is the witchcraft of our time.

Pronouncing native-born Americans of African descent to be aliens goes as far back as Thomas Jefferson and the other founders.

Today’s talk of “biracial” or “multiracial” people rehabilitates mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and the like—yesterday’s terms for mixed ancestry.

Whatever she thought she was saying about mixed ancestry and mental health, the very phrase accurate racial identity ought to set off sirens. Dangerous lies do not always dress the part.

According to an estimate derived from decades of census reports, some 24 percent of Americans listed in 1970 as “white” probably had African ancestors, while more than 80 percent of those listed as “black” had non-African ones, which implies that there were nearly twice as many white as black Americans of African descent.

In sum, restoring notions of race mixture to center stage recommits us, willy-nilly, to the discredited idea of racial purity, the basic premise of bio-racism.

“racecraft.” That term highlights the ability of pre- or non-scientific modes of thought to hijack the minds of the scientifically literate.

I love the term.

Racism refers to the theory and the practice of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry, and to the ideology surrounding such a double standard.

Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once.

Jefferson

“Lessons from History: Why Race and Ethnicity Have Played a Major Role in Biomedical Research,” The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 34:3 (Fall 2006),

Venter, A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life

“ANCESTRYdotBOMB: Genealogy, Genomics, Mischief, Mystery, and Southern Family Stories,” Journal of Southern History 76 (February 2010),

Palmié, “Genomics, Divination, ‘Racecraft,’”

Derrick Bell, “After We’re Gone: Prudent Speculations on America in a Post-Racial Epoch,” St. Louis University Law Journal 34 (1990),

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984 [orig. ed. 1787]), 264–5.

Jiannbin Lee Shiao, Thomas Bode, Amber Beyer, and Daniel Selvig, “The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race,” Sociological Theory, 30:2 (June 2012),

racecraft daily performed its conjuror’s trick of transforming racism into race, leaving black persons in view while removing white persons from the stage.

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

The missing step between someone’s physical appearance and an invidious outcome is the practice of a double standard: in a word, racism.

Racism did not require a racist. It required only that, in the split second before firing the fatal shot, the white officer entered the twilight zone of America’s racecraft.

“Minority” ranks alongside “the color of their skin” as a verbal prop for the mental trick that turns racism into race.

Practical hid the qualitative and invidious meaning of “minority” inside the quantitative one.

That imprint of American rearing is not limited to white Americans, nor does travel abroad automatically disable its mental apparatus.

Black people everywhere do not “see” alike. Persons from Africa and the Caribbean may not see what Afro-Americans see.

Whereas the children had not understood the classification system, the director and his wife had not grasped, until the moment came, that a sumptuary code was in effect. Sumptuary codes enforce social classification. They consist of rules, written or unwritten, that establish unequal rank and make it immediately visible.

Daily enforcement of such rules among peer groups of children both creates and polices racial distinctness.

Invented in the late-nineteenth-century heyday of the Jim Crow regime, the term “race relations” finessed the abrogation of democracy and the bloody vigilantism that enforced it.

It would seem as clear as noonday that class inequality had imposed sickness on these American schoolchildren. Yet the article’s summary tails off into confused pseudo-genetics.

Understood as kin and as kind, blood inhabits the profoundest layer of mystique that humanity has carried with it from time immemorial. As a natural substance, blood is far older than the mystique and entirely independent of it.

blood made in society by human beings has properties that nature knows nothing about. It can consecrate and purify; it can also profane and pollute. It can define a community and police the borders thereof.

Project RACE

The scientific concept “DNA” has slid into a spurious synonymy with “blood,” the ancient metaphor of kinship and descent.

Only as metaphor may one speak of “black genes” and “white genes,” or of “white” and “black” blood. But once invoked, the metaphor launches a logical program of its own: If “blood” is synonymous with “race,” and “DNA” is synonymous with “blood,” then “DNA” is synonymous with “race.” Although spurious, that synonymy engages a powerful logic in its turn. Invoke a race, and the notion of a distinguishing blood stands to reason. In the folk lexicon, that is precisely what race means.

As a disorder of the blood, sickle cell in America has become entangled in the folk notions surrounding the notion of blood-as-race.

some of this blood and some of that, Americans typically do not register the concept as metaphorical. Many non-Americans find it so bizarre as to defy translation.

William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1994),

Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race

“How Richard Nixon Invented Hispanics,” in The Future Uncertain: Culture, Economics, Future(s), September 26, 2005, http://futureuncertain.blogspot.com.

Montagu, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, Third Edition

Savitt, “Tracking Down the First Recorded Sickle Cell Patient in Western Medicine,” Journal of the National Medical Association 102:11 (November 2010), 981–92.

Musafer Aksoy, “Sickle Cell Anemia in South Turkey: A Study of Fifteen Cases in Twelve White Families,” Blood 11 (1956), 463. See also William C. Boyd, “Detection of the Selective Advantages of the Heterozygotes in Man,” Physical Anthropology 13:1 (March 1955), 37–52.

Michael G. Kenny, “A Question of Blood, Race, and Politics,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61:4 (2006), 457–91, 459.

For example, my students read the great Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, with its vivid close-up of his owners’ religious conversions, style of consumption, speech habits, and general character, but, despite all that, retain the notion that slavery belongs to the past of black Americans alone.

It is easy to overlook the fact that the apparatus of Jim Crow, like that of slavery, imposed relations of dominance and subordination among Euro-Americans, not just between Afro-Americans and Euro-Americans.

With the end of slavery, in which owners exploited laborers by owning their persons, employers commanded labor by controlling access to the means of labor, subsistence, and livelihood. The power of controlling such access takes many forms, and those seeking access understand full well the protean quality of the force that blocks them, as well as the complicated rituals through which they must dramatize their own subjection. Education could be a militant act in and of itself, on the part of both teacher and student.

Morrison, “Introduction: Friday on the Potomac,” in Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Reality

David Hollinger has performed a valuable service by insisting on the historical uniqueness of the Afro-American experience, rejecting the false history, spurious logic, and expedient politics that collapse the situations of Afro-Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and indigenous Americans into a single category.

Disguised as race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather than something racists do. Racists and apologists for racism have long availed themselves of the deception.

“Race” appears in the titles of an ever-growing number of scholarly books and articles as a euphemism for slavery, disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, mass murder, and related historical atrocities; or as unintentionally belittling shorthand for “persons of African descent and anything pertaining to them.”