Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

Today’s talk of “biracial” or “multiracial” people rehabilitates mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, and the like—yesterday’s terms for mixed ancestry.4

“Self-esteem is directly tied to accurate racial identity,” said one mother.

some 24 percent of Americans listed in 1970 as “white” probably had African ancestors, while more than 80 percent of those listed as “black” had non-African ones, which implies that there were nearly twice as many white as black Americans of African descent.

sum, restoring notions of race mixture to center stage recommits us, willy-nilly, to the discredited idea of racial purity, the basic premise of bio-racism.

“Bio-racism” is a more precise appellation for the nineteenth-century research just sketched than the more usual term, “race

“help illustrate that the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis; and that there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another in the five Celera genomes”

“skin colour as a surrogate for race is a social concept, not a scientific one.”27

Dr. Watson is someone whom nineteenth-century census takers would have classified as an octoroon if they had been able to see behind appearance.

What an irony, then, if the World War II defeat of the Nazis did indeed discredit race science, only to have the yearning for “identity” and the jaw swabs of Afro-American bio-genealogists abet its revival. Whatever

Post-racial turns out to be—simply—racial; which is to say, racist.

Americans wove racist concepts into a public language about inequality that made “black” the virtual equivalent of “poor” and “lower class,” thus creating a distinctive idiom that has no parallel in other Western democracies. The

Instead he proposed as an “analogy” the gut-level physical repugnance aristocrats felt toward their equally white, but unequally born, compatriots.38

The late Derrick Bell seems to have coined the phrase “post-racial.”

In the time it takes to say “racecraft,” growing class inequality, the shared theme of their work and Bell’s, became inaudible, despite its prominence in a very long book.

Murray’s white underclass was identical to its black counterpart.

The “welfare mother” can no longer stand for what is not right with America.

The term race stands for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank.

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.

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.

foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once.

racecraft exists objectively; it has topographical features that Americans regularly navigate, and we cannot readily stop traversing it. Unlike

is to picture a bygone real world of normally constituted people who accepted, as obviously true, notions that the real world of one’s own present dismisses as obviously false.

Thus Luther recounts, in a single thought, his mother’s chronic asthma and her stated belief that a neighbor’s evil eye caused it and her own explanation, that the woman had repeatedly rebuffed her friendly overtures.

Sounds a lot like microaggressions

The talkers respond to, but ignore, the

interviewer’s question about the mechanism of the evil eye. It exists, period. The interviewer does not press, and does not need to.

Such is the stuff that racecraft is made of. It occupies a middle ground between science and superstition, an invisible realm of collective understandings, a half-lit zone of the mind’s eye.

Think no further than the media-borne miscellany of

things tabulated “by race”—from hardy perennials like teenage pregnancy to novelties like “under-representation” among blood donors69 and “disproportionate representation” on Twitter,70 constantly churning out factitious evidence for an ever-expanding American immensity, the so-called racial divide.

To them, witchcraft was obvious, not odd. Turn now to a tour of racecraft. Will its features seem familiar or strange, obvious or odd?

Those of racecraft govern what goes with what and whom (sumptuary codes), how different people must deal with each other (rituals of deference and dominance), where human kinship begins and ends (blood), and how Americans look at themselves and each other (the gaze).

“Would you please stop at the next gas station [restroom]?” They stopped. Not long thereafter, Zephyr said, “Mr. President, would you mind stopping by the side of the road?” The President replied with his well-known earthiness, “Why the hell didn’t you do it when Bird and I did?” Zephyr answered, “Cause

they wouldn’t let me.” (Notice Zephyr’s “they”).

Everyone has

skin color, but not everyone’s skin color counts as race, let alone as evidence of criminal conduct.

Racism did not require a racist. It required only that, in the split second before firing the fatal shot, the white officer entered the twilight zone of America’s racecraft.

Is it imaginable that police would round up, detain, question, and search every white person in a town because an elderly victim of attempted armed robbery described her assailant as a white male, possibly young and possibly with an injured wrist?

Black people everywhere do not “see” alike.

Most of all, how is it that grown-ups decided, all at once, to run from children?

Sumptuary codes enforce social classification. They consist of rules, written or unwritten, that establish unequal rank and make it immediately visible. When

Charlestonians demanded legislation to “prevent the slaves from wearing silks, satins, crapes, lace muslins, and such costly stuffs as are looked upon and considered the luxury of dress,” because “every distinction should be created between the whites and the negroes, calculated to make the latter feel the superiority of the former.”

An emancipated slave acted in the same spirit when she defined “freedom” as buying herself a blue dress with polka dots.13

the incident at first looked like an extreme case of “driving while black.”

Both encounters show that the everyday routines that organize racism do not always, but always can, explode.

Sumptuary rules produce a regular supply of circumstantial evidence about what the world is made of and who belongs where within it. Not only can rules endowed with that power shape action in advance, they can also shape opinions of which the holders may be unaware until the moment they come into play.

pundits mocked Obama’s speech daily materialize in inner-city schools whenever children learn to mock the use of Standard English as “trying to be white,” and to enforce use of “Black English” through bullying.

“Why food stamps?” has two stock answers, depending on the ancestry of the person using them: on the one hand, fecklessness; on the other, bad luck, plant-closing, and the like.21

Social equality was the taboo that Theodore Roosevelt violated by inviting Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House.

Then and there, through the transforming power of racecraft, an individual becomes a race, roommates become an “interracial pairing,” and the outcome, whether friction or friendship, becomes “race relations.”25

But it is doubtful that those foes of political correctness would wish to rehabilitate that part of bio-racism that once identified inferior white races.

compulsory sterilization of persons held to be “defective and degenerate,” a group that included “the shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.”