Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

Racism is not an emotion or state of mind, such as intolerance, bigotry, hatred, or malevolence. If it were that, it would easily be overwhelmed; most people mean well, most of the time, and in any case are usually busy pursuing other purposes. Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race, as just defined, so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.

Neither “witch” nor “pure race” has a material existence. Both are products of thought, and of language. Having no material existence, they cannot have material causation.

In the teaching of American history, perhaps the most difficult lesson to convey is that slavery once held the entire country in its grip. It was not just the business of enslaved black people, slaveholders, or the South. Slavery engaged an immense geography of connected activities that no Americans could escape, whoever they were and wherever they lived. What is more, slavery does not belong only to America’s past, but is the heritage of all Americans alive today, including those of recent vintage. Slavery enthroned inequality both among free citizens and between slaves and owners and, in the manner of its ending, left inequality as a permanent bequest to America’s future.

Even language can be squeezed into the glass slipper of race by a sufficiently ruthless pruning of the foot. According to believers in something known as “black English,” the deep structures of African languages—in other words, the speakers’ African-ness—accounts for the speech habits of Afro-Americans. But African linguistic structures cannot explain why, despite the much greater survival of Africanisms in Jamaican creole, the children of Jamaican migrants to Britain do not speak “black English”; instead, they speak English as white Britons of their class and region do. (Nor can such structures explain why there is no such thing as black French, black Portuguese, or black Spanish.) The speech patterns of Afro-Americans testify not to the greater strength of African linguistic survivals among Afro-Americans as compared to Afro-Caribbean migrants in Britain but to the greater prevalence and rigidity of segregated schooling, housing, and sociability, especially among the working class, in the United States, as compared to Britain.20 Racism, in other words, not race.

It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves as a race. Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery.

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.

Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. 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.

Whatever Afro-American people’s identity may be (and a well-argued recent article proposes doing away with the concept altogether14), it cannot be equated with their race. After years of probing them for something of value or use, W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated all efforts to define race as a characteristic or attribute of its victims, whether the definition hinged on biology, culture, or identity (supposing “identity” to mean an individual’s or a group’s sense of self). 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.”15

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.”

“It must be remembered,” Du Bois explains, “that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.”18 To