Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters.

The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies.

Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.

The cosmetic applied to the resulting asymmetry and invidiousness is “whiteness,” whose champions purport to discover “racialization”—and therefore races—all over the shop. A further sleight of hand defines race as identity so that “white” also becomes a race.

Once the race-racism evasion has seated monstrosity in the realm of the normal, corollary evasions follow.

Tolerance itself, generally surrounded by a beatific glow in American political discussion, is another evasion born of the race-racism switch.

Whether called assimilation or amalgamation, the goal of blending in the discordant element operates on the rationale rather than on the problem. Framing questions in those terms guarantees that the answers will remain entangled in racist ideology.

David A. Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review 108 (December

Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, in “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29 (2000), 1–47,

the Court knew no better way to rectify injustice at the end of the twentieth century than to re-enthrone the superstitious racial dogma of the nineteenth century. In fact, the Supreme Court had little choice, bound as it is by American precedent and history—bound, that is to say, by its participation in those rituals that daily create and re-create race in its characteristic American form.

Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons.

The first boom in what would eventually become the United States took place during the 1620s, and it rested primarily on the backs of English indentured servants, not African slaves. Not until late in the century, after the boom had passed, did landowners begin buying slaves in large numbers, first from the West Indies and then, after 1680, from Africa itself.

Indentured servants served longer terms in Virginia than their English counterparts and enjoyed less dignity and less protection in law and custom. They could be bought and sold like livestock, kidnapped, stolen, put up as stakes in card games, and awarded—even before their arrival in America—to the victors in lawsuits.

Virginia was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood to make a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods. Only those who could force large numbers of people to work tobacco for them stood to get rich during the tobacco boom.

Ultimately, the only check upon oppression is the strength and effectiveness of resistance to it.

It was a fortunate circumstance—fortunate for some, anyway—that made Africans and Afro-West Indians available for plantation labor at the historical moment when it became practical to buy slaves for life, and at the same time difficult and dangerous to continue using Europeans as the main source of plantation labor.

Race as a coherent ideology did not spring into being simultaneously with slavery, but took even more time than slavery did to become systematic.

The reverse is more to the point. People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed.

All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements. Or, to put it another way, part of what human beings understand by the word “nature” is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable, repetitive social routine:

Facts of nature spawned by the needs of ideology sometimes acquire greater power over people’s minds than facts of nature spawned by nature itself.

The domination of plantation slavery over Southern society preserved the social space within which the white yeomanry—that is, the small farmers and artisans who accounted for about three-fourths of the white families in the slave South just before the Civil War—could enjoy economic independence and a large measure of local self-determination, insulated from the realm of capitalist market society. By doing so, slavery permitted and required the white majority to develop its own characteristic form of racial ideology.

Within their local communities, the white non-slaveholders developed a way of life as different from that of the slaveowning planters as from that of farmers in those Northern states where capitalist agriculture already prevailed.

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.

Ideologies do not need to be plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see—ritually, repetitively—on a daily basis.

ideology

Her definition of ideology is similar to Bourdieu's habitus.

ideology is a distillate of experience.

Habitus

political hegemony.

Gramsci?

they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes that discovery—by making people stop again and again

Human beings live in human societies by negotiating a certain social terrain, whose map they keep alive in their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they must carry out in order to negotiate the terrain. If the terrain changes, so must their activities, and therefore so must the map.

The pro-slavery intellectuals’ reticence in stating that conclusion publicly and forthrightly goes far to explain why the United States to this day has failed to develop a thorough, consistent, and honest political conservatism.

If race lives on today, it does not live on because we have inherited it from our forebears of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth or nineteenth, but because we continue to create it today.

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not in Our Genes (New York: Pantheon, 1984).

St. Francis College, et al. v. Majid Ghaidan A1-Khazraji, and Shaare Tefila Congregation v. John William Cobb et al., May 18, 1987.

Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward

Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom

Race relations as an analysis of society takes for granted that race is a valid empirical datum and thereby shifts attention from the actions that constitute racism—enslavement, disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, massacres, and pogroms—to the traits that constitute race.

The problem, How to maintain the institution of chattel slavery, ceased to be at Appomattox; the problem, How to maintain the social, industrial, and civic inferiority of the descendants of chattel slaves, succeeded it, and is the race problem of the South at the present time. There is no other.

If allowed the rights of citizenship, Afro-Americans potentially held in their own hands the balance of power between contending groups of white people. If stripped of the rights of citizenship, they still potentially held the balance of power, only not in their own hands.

Redeemers, discusses their social provenance, and characterizes their political program, he makes clear that the central issue for their regimes was how to forestall democracy. The “most common characteristic” of Redeemer state constitutions, he asserts, was “an overweening distrust of legislatures”

The Reconstruction constitutions, sponsored by Republican regimes confident about controlling the votes of the newly enfranchised former slaves, heightened the struggle by upsetting antebellum arrangements that had limited the power of planters in the Black Belt over the white-majority counties.

The Mississippi Plan stripped the franchise from the Afro-American majority and lodged with a minority of white people control over the rest. In the face of the resulting hostility, the convention decided against submitting the new state constitution for ratification by the electorate

It is not done, however, to interpret these matters as issues of democracy and its abrogation, particularly not where Afro-Americans are concerned.

As i understand the author would like to see this history read as the abrogation of democracy in the South.

The effort to redefine race as culture or identity is bound to come a cropper just as did the effort to define race as biology.

Race as culture is only biological race in polite language: No one can seriously postulate cultural homogeneity among those whose racial homogeneity scholars nonetheless take for granted.

The only veil hiding the conjuror’s apparatus from full view of the spectators is the quicksilver propensity of culture to change meaning from one clause to the next—now denoting something essential, now something acquired; now something bounded, now something without boundaries; now something experienced, now something ascribed.

Scholars are quick to assimilate the commonplace that race is “socially constructed”—which a German shepherd dog or even an intelligent golden retriever knows without instruction—to the popular but mistaken view that race is equivalent to identity.

Race as identity breaks down on the irreducible fact that any sense of self intrinsic to persons of African descent is subject to peremptory nullification by forcible extrinsic identification.

The black man is not someone of a specified ancestry or culture, he decided, and certainly not someone who so identifies himself. A black man “is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”

Forced to ride Jim Crow is the key. Not identity as sense of self, but identification by others, peremptory and binding, figuring even in well-meant efforts to undo the crimes of racism. The victim’s intangible race, rather than the perpetrator’s tangible racism, becomes the center of attention. Thus, racist profiling goes by the misnomer “racial profiling,” and the usual remedy proposed for it is to collect information about—what else?—the victims’ “race.”

Racial equality and racial justice are not figures of speech; they are public frauds, political acts with political consequences. Just as a half-truth is not a type of truth but a type of lie, so equality and justice, once modified by racial, become euphemisms for their opposites.