Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

“It remained for the New South to find … a definition of free labor, both black and white; for the white worker’s place in the New Order would be vitally conditioned by the place assigned to the free black worker”

To Woodward, “ritual and Jim Crow” is more a symptom of white people’s exploitation than a remedy or compensation for it. His point is not that Jim Crow compensated white people for exploitation but, rather, that white people suffered plenty of exploitation that needed compensating for.

The rituals and laws that exempted the white worker from the penalties of caste did not exempt him from competition with black labor, nor did they carry assurance that the penalties of black labor might not be extended to white. The propagandists of the New-South order, in advertising the famed cheap labor of their region, were not meticulous in distinguishing between the color of their wares.

Slavery was a system for the extortion of labor, not for the management of “race relations,” whether by segregation or by integration.

Woodward understands segregation to be an act of political power, as well as a constitutional and moral wrong—an act of power that, whatever the popular sentiment behind it, gained its force from the authority of the state.

The moonlight-and-magnolias nostalgia for slavery and the Old South, along with the cult of the Lost Cause, was part of the new order, according to Woodward, not an echo of the old.

The speech patterns of Afro-Americans do not reflect a stronger survival of African linguistic patterns among Afro-Americans, as compared to Anglo-Caribbeans. Instead, they testify to the greater prevalence, strength, and rigidity in the United States, as compared to the United Kingdom, of segregated schooling, residence, and sociability, especially among the working class.

Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

My research has pressed me to explore both witchcraft (with the invisible ontology it presupposes) and what I will call racecraft (with the invisible ontology that it, too, presupposes),

Either his European readers were in fact intellectually unlike his African subjects, or Africa’s witchcraft and Europe’s racecraft were different orders of phenomena,

In my work on racecraft, I have been struck over and over again by such intellectual commonalities with witchcraft as circular reasoning, prevalence of confirming rituals, barriers to disconfirming factual evidence, self-fulfilling prophecies, multiple and inconsistent causal ideas, and colorfully inventive folk genetics.

And to these must be added varieties of more or less legitimized collective action such as gossip, exclusion, scapegoating, and so on, up to and including various forms of coercion (which is to say that the logical and methodological byways of racecraft, like those of witchcraft, are rife with dangers to body as well as to mind).

take it as characteristic that the rational software of racecraft, like that of witchcraft, accommodates disconfirming evidence in additive, rather than transformative, fashion.

witchcraft can be defined this way: one among a complex system of beliefs, with combined moral and cognitive content, that presuppose invisible, spiritual (i.e., nonmaterial) entities underlying, and continually acting upon, the visible, material realm of beings and events.

racecraft: one among a complex system of beliefs, also with combined moral and cognitive content, that presuppose invisible, spiritual qualities underlying, and continually acting upon, the material realm of beings and events.

Racecraft can even do without the physical descriptor altogether, giving theoretical consistency full sway. Homer Plessy of the US Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which created the doctrine of separate but equal, appeared white until he announced his “colored” essence.

Invisible ontologies require, and therefore acquire, visible props.

In racecraft, physical features function merely as a visible index of an invisible essence that is separate and different from them. Racial essences belong to racecraft’s invisible ontology even though the visible manifestations of those essences are usually available to most Americans, from fifty yards or more, as race.

if racecraft is like witchcraft, then repetition can do no more than transmute the scientific statement into the ritual drone of a mantra.

Like witchcraft in its African contexts, racecraft points to truth about important relationships here, and to terms of human connectedness in our home community that are in reality determinative for all our lives. In those circumstances, talk of color-blindness resonates either as the visionary message of King’s I Have a Dream speech or as a kind of peekaboo dishonesty on the part of self-interested racecraft. In like fashion,

Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New

The scaffolding of its main argument is an extended study of collective identifications imagined in the same way as races: the totemic clans of aboriginal Australia.

Durkheim’s general question is this: How is it that humans come to hold on to beliefs about cosmic nature that cannot possibly be true—and that, besides, cosmic nature unceasingly contradicts?

He finds the answer in their social being,

In that second inquiry, fundamental to the first, Durkheim studies the collective alchemy by which reason converts bald-faced inventions into external and constraining facts of nature, capable of resisting individual doubt.

Through periodically repeated ritual, and through symbolic reminders between times, the name-essence is experienced as palpably real.

That of French Jews came through a series of decrees beginning in 1790, which released them from various restrictions.

Durkheim, “L’Individualisme et les intellectuels,” in the Paris publication Revue politique et litteraire: revue bleue 10 (1899),

Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1939 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979),

As the social alchemy of racecraft transforms racism into race, disguising collective social practice as inborn individual traits, so it entrenches racism in a category to itself, setting it apart from inequality in other guises.

The initial designation of Afro-Americans as a race on the basis of their class position has colored all subsequent discussion of inequality, even among white persons.

racecraft offers white Americans a plausible way to hold someone responsible, but not an effective way to seek redress.

Racism tagged the midnight shoppers as “into” something unsavory because they appeared to be out of work; racecraft concealed the truth that the electrician and the midnight shoppers suffer under the same regime of inequality.

Racism as readily prompts a suspicion that black Americans who hold jobs are “into” something unsavory, if they hold jobs from which discrimination previously excluded them.

racecrafters contrived, via television, a collective hypnosis that stigmatized hardworking black people, while concealing the regime of inequality. Smoke from the fire of white workers’ rage obscured the air-conditioned boardrooms where executives chose overseas destinations for North Carolina’s manufacturing jobs, heedless of whether those left without work were white or black.

In a manner of speaking, racecraft steps down the current of macro-economic inequality to suit the small appliances of everyday life and the limited purview of their hard-pressed users.

The election of Obama held the potential, under those circumstances, to lift the taboo on public discussion of inequality. Racecraft being what it is, however, the chatter at the time fixed instead on the president’s ancestry as the true significance of the moment. But what was truly significant was the election’s taking place against a background of economic collapse that called in question thirty years’ worth of apologetics in favor of inequality.

Inequality never stands merely as fact, as the way things are or the way things are done: it requires moral reinforcement in collective beliefs. What beliefs and of what sort depends on place and history.

Up to the day before yesterday, the orthodox catechism in America held that inequality is a good thing because it promotes economic growth that (ultimately) benefits everyone, even if the benefits accrue only modestly, if at all, to those on the bottom. According to the dogma, efforts to lessen inequality, through progressive taxation or redistributive public spending, infringe the liberty of the rich. Furthermore, the rich deserve their reward. Ostensibly buttressing that view were studies suggesting that inequality in wealth and income results from genetically programmed differences in IQ. Intelligence determines merit, and merit apportions rewards. The racist implications of the most celebrated declaration of that thesis deflected attention from its implications for working-class white people: that, like Afro-Americans, white people consigned to the lower reaches of society were there because of low intelligence.

Adept at racecraft ritual, the opponents knew that identifying health-care reform with black people would frighten away many white people who might otherwise have supported it.

Precisely because racism shares a nervous system with inequality in general, the same inclination to shun identification with black Americans makes it impossible for him to identify with the modest wage and salary-earners, the unemployed, and the working and disabled poor of all ancestries; in short, the bottom 99 percent of American society. It is one of the perversities of American public language that it is hard even to evoke these people—a majority of Americans, after all—without appearing to single out Afro-Americans; without, in other words, becoming entangled in racecraft.

Racecraft is a ready-made propaganda weapon for use against the aspirations of the great majority of working Americans. Sooner or later, tacitly or openly, any move to tackle inequality brings racecraft into play.

People marching under the banner of biracialism and multi-racialism, demanding “recognition” of “biracial/multiracial” bone marrow and umbilical cord blood and official sanction for “biracial” and “multiracial” as categories of human beings, may not be aware of the malignant history to which they are signing on.

Racecraft operates like a railroad switch, diverting a train from one track to another. It is unlike a railroad switch, however, in that the switchman seldom controls where the train ends up.

David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York: Knopf, 1967).

Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000).