Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

The author of the obituary ruminated on the idiotic question that must have been percolating in many minds: Which race could justly

claim this superlatively gifted individual?

While the “white races” of the past became ethnic groups, the opposite has happened to the census category “Hispanic.”

Census enumerators in California were soon locking horns with “Hispanic” families who rejected the term Hispanic.

“The scientifically established universal truth,” declared the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, fuming over the Nazis’ efforts to read the evidence otherwise, “is that all human beings, no matter of what creed or complexion they may be, are of one and the same blood.”55

It ordered segregation of the blood supply for what it called “reasons not biologically convincing” but “commonly recognized [as] psychologically important in America.”81

Who would have thought, at this late date, that people would conceive a hankering to rehabilitate racist subcategories that were born centuries ago in every New World slave society except the United States—which made do with a categorical black/white distinction?

primitive fascination with blood as a mystical symbol of group membership,

This purposefully encoded, politically deployed racecraft serves as a reminder that what depends on imagination and action is more flexible than nature, and has the power to create a quasi-nature more convincing than nature itself.

identify the moment when “the idea of absurdity” began to travel alongside stories of “old women riding on broomsticks,” the moment when the improbability of such stories could be felt, at long last.121

we invite our fellow Americans to explore how the falsehoods of racecraft are made in everyday life, in order to work out how to unmake them. Once we Americans learn to see them for what they are, we can make sense of our past and therefore of our present.

we both hold the philosophical view that means and ends should cohere in all human endeavor, a rule that applies to scholarly research in the social sciences (no matter what discipline), and, I daresay, more generally, to research in any field.

These themes stand out most clearly, perhaps, if expressed in terms of two sets of apparent opposites: individual experience versus collective experience and separate histories versus joint histories.

“separate versus joint,” we indicate a distinction that only sometimes makes sense, between something called “African American history” and something called, simply, “American history.”

President-itis (the disease that leads otherwise sane people to argue that Eisenhower launched the Civil Rights Movement, Lincoln freed the slaves, Roosevelt cured the depression, and Nixon ended the war in Vietnam) is a common example, but not the only one, of a big picture that proves false because its individual components have gotten lost.

But “uneducated” does not mean “inarticulate.”

black English (a concept, by the way, that fools people who would not for a moment fall for anything called “white English,” though people of European descent have their own distinctive ways of speaking English just as do people of African descent).

The only drawback was that if she got tired, she couldn’t sit down. The benches by Colonial Lake were for white only.

It wasn’t forbidden for a black woman to take any color baby to Colonial Lake; she just couldn’t sit down.2

Correspondingly, his anger when he discovered his mistake grew from the realization that he had mistakenly offered courtesy to a black woman, thinking he was offering it to her white employer.

among the separate lives divided by the color line, lives that we must analyze together if we are to make sense of them, are those of white people whose rank with respect to each other requires examination.

vast reservoir of bitterness and violence might overflow at any moment against the Afro-American whose words or actions, or whose simple being, reminded a white person of his subservience to another white person.

black children were taught early on, for safety’s sake, that you’d best “watch yourself” around poor white people, frightening because they were “resentful,” elongated in Charlestonian speech as “resayantful.” Until that day, it had not occurred to Grandmother and Grandfather Fields that higher-class white people saw poor white people in pretty much the same way.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of the Book, and all else shall be added unto you.”

To read the entire symposium is to be reminded that early twentieth-century racists—and bio-racists—did not spare notionally white people.

his successors fall back on italics or quotation marks, typographical abbreviations for the trite formula, “race is a social construction.”

Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.

there can be only one race, since the one-drop-of-blood or any-known-ancestry rule applies only to African ancestry;17 indeed, the rule ceases to function at all if applied to more than one type of ancestry.

The cosmetic applied to the resulting asymmetry and invidiousness is “whiteness,” whose champions purport to discover “racialization”—and therefore races—all over the shop. A further sleight of hand defines race as identity so that “white” also becomes a race.18

tolerance has unimpeachably anti-democratic credentials, dividing society into persons entitled to claim respect as a right and persons obliged to beg tolerance as a favor.

Hannah Arendt illustrates another corollary of the race-racism evasion by insisting that the denial of human and citizenship rights is divisible into parts, some worthier of condemnation than others, and prohibition of intermarriage the worst of all.

What is wrong with racism?

holds that racism is wrong because it violates the basic rights of human being and citizen.

is that it subjects persons of provably mixed ancestry to the same stigma and penalties as persons of unambiguously African ancestry.

Such a view, for all the aura of progressivism and righteousness that currently surrounds multiracialism, is not a cure for racism but a particularly ugly manifestation of

Racism is a qualitative, not a quantitative, evil. Its harm does not depend on how many people fall under its ban but on the fact that any at all do. And the first principle of racism is belief in race, even if the believer does not deduce from that belief that the member of a race should be enslaved or disfranchised or shot on sight by trigger-happy police officers or asked for identification when crossing the campus of the university where he teaches, just as believing that the sun travels around the earth is geocentrism, whether or not one deduces from the belief that persons affirming the contrary should be hauled before an inquisition and forced to recant.

“Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” 48–51. Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, in “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29 (2000), 1–47, pours a needed bucket of cold water on the ubiquitous concept of “identity.”

One of the most important of the absurd assumptions, accepted implicitly by most Americans, is that there is really only one race, the Negro race.

That is why, in the United States, there are scholars and black scholars, women and black women. Saul Bellow and John Updike are writers; Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison are black writers. George Bush and Michael Dukakis were candidates for president; Jesse Jackson was a black candidate for president.

A second absurd assumption inseparable from race in its characteristic American form takes for granted that virtually everything people of African descent do, think, or say is racial in nature.

He does not ask why Europeans seeking the “ultimate” method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No

The three-fifths clause distinguishes between free Persons—who might be of European or African descent—and other Persons, a euphemism for slaves.

When well-meaning people affirm, for rhetorical effect, that the Constitution declared Afro-Americans to be only three-fifths human, they commit an error for which American historians themselves must accept the blame.

Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons. The

The first boom in what would eventually become the United States took place during the 1620s, and it rested primarily on the backs of English indentured servants, not African slaves.

Neither white skin nor English nationality protected servants from the grossest forms of brutality and exploitation.

From Peterloo to Santiago, Chile, to Kwangju, South Korea, to Tiananmen Square and the barrios of San Salvador, humanity has learned again and again that shared color and nationality set no automatic limit to oppression.

Indeed, African slaves during the years between 1619 and 1661 enjoyed rights that, in the nineteenth century, not even free black people could claim.22

Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code.

the incorporation of Africans and their descendants into a polity and society in which they lacked rights that others not only took for granted, but claimed as a matter of self-evident natural law.27