Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

During the 2008 presidential election campaign, hardly a week passed without a reference to America’s “post-racial” society, which the election of Barack Obama supposedly would establish. If anyone really was imagining such a thing as a post-racial America, what that might be was hard to pin down. Right through the campaign, references to “race” and the “race card” kept jostling the “post” in “post-racial.” When insinuations about Obama’s supposed foreignness cropped up, one journalist called that “the new race card.”1 In fact, it is among the oldest and most durable. Pronouncing native-born Americans of African descent to be aliens goes as far back as Thomas Jefferson and the other founders. More than a century later, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation launched American cinema with the same pronouncement in its opening sequence.2 And, a few days after the 2008 vote, suits filed in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to overturn President Obama’s election denied his American birth in order to deny his citizenship. Far from holding mere playing cards in their hands, those who brought suit had historical bedrock under their feet, and a ready-made place in national discourse.3 How and why a handful of racist notions have gained permanent sustenance in American life is the subject of this book.

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. That may be what the economist Glenn Loury intends when he identifies “a withholding of the presumption of equal humanity.”50 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. Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”—a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke—paff—reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole. In similar fashion, enslavers disappear only to reappear, disguised, in stories that append physical traits defined as slave-like to those enslaved.