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.