Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields

The peasants did not fall under the dominion of the nobility by virtue of being perceived as innately inferior. On the contrary, they came to be perceived as innately inferior by virtue of having fallen under the nobility’s dominion.

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It

Ideology is not the same as propaganda.

was their experience with slaveowners, not least the slaveowners’ hysterical equation of the Republican Party with abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves’ acting on that foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.

The most successful propagandist is one who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized.

The social relations that once gave explicit meaning to that ritual gesture of the vassal’s subordination to his lord are now as dead as a mackerel, and so, therefore, is the ideological vocabulary—including the posture of prayer—in which those social relations once lived.

For these activities to proceed, the natives must not just submit, they must cooperate.

rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature’s God. But

There, slavery was not a minor exception but the central organizing principle of society, allocating social space not just to slaveholders and slaves but to the free black population42 and the non-slaveholding white majority as well.

Origins of the New South, by the great American historian C. Vann Woodward.1

Meaningless definitions of their predicament that may pass muster today, such as marginalization and exclusion, did not fool him for a minute.

he recognizes that the essence of the situation was power and the contest over it: not just the contest (grotesquely unequal as it

was) between white and Afro-American people but also that among white people themselves.

As Woodward makes clear, the question was not white supremacy but “which whites should be supreme” (328, Woodward’s italics).

To Woodward, “ritual and Jim Crow” is more a symptom of white people’s exploitation than a remedy or compensation for

rather, that white people suffered plenty of exploitation that needed compensating for.

Only in the 1890s did the Confederacy become an emotional symbol.22

although I certainly know from other contexts that white Charleston, for some intents and purposes, distinguished “respectable” black people from others.

“But the finest stories,” according to Benjamin, “are characterized by the lack of explanation.” Because the hearer or reader is left to interpret according to his own understanding, “the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”

She did not see what I suddenly saw, a Southern tableau: the impressionable white girl and her oppressive male kin (or perhaps the oppressive girl and her impressionable kin) enforcing an unjust etiquette of domination.

witchcraft accusations displace structurally inbuilt social tensions onto available victims;

oracles work within an idiom of thought that seems bizarre but nonetheless has markedly logical and systematic features; and (3) professional specialists in magic know how to obtain (within their own logic) both true and tricked results.

one among a complex system of beliefs, with combined moral and cognitive content, that presuppose invisible, spiritual (i.e., nonmaterial) entities underlying, and continually acting upon, the visible, material realm of beings and events.

one among a complex system of beliefs,

that presuppose invisible, spiritual qualities underlying, and continually acting upon, the materia...

making or doing and its companion, the socially ratified belief that travels before and after it, as input and as output.

The invisible aspect of race becomes apparent, however, as soon as we reflect that the focus of racecraft is not the outward, visible color of a person’s skin (hair type, bone structure, etc.) but the presumed inward, invisible content of that person’s character.

“one-eighth African blood, with no discernible black features, and [was] thus entitled to the legal privileges of a white man.”

“Racial” incidents are frequent, criminals and medical patients are counted by race, statistical studies reveal racial differences in everything from death from prostate cancer to rates of decline in the incidence of teenage pregnancy.

In our race-conscious world, virtually anything that can be counted will eventually be sorted, classified, and published by someone according to “racial” differences—which, as such lists demonstrate, are everywhere and have inner mechanisms that, it is assumed, science will eventually vindicate.

The tough individualists belong to the latter group, but no amount of argument can shake the perception and conception of them, from fifty yards, as undeserving beneficiaries of handouts—at best, and at worst, as dangerous people.

Once acquired, that seeing becomes open-endedly applicable to specific contingencies of life, as they come up, or at least until the theorizing impulse hardens them into fixed forms.

To gain the edge for Jesse Helms in his closely contested last Senate race, all it took was for the senator’s TV admen to show a white hand receiving a pink slip and a black one receiving a pay stub.

As inheritors of the Enlightenment, we have foundational intellectual investments not in traditional authority but in rationality. We turn to rationality in both cognitive and moral reflection. In rough and ready fashion, therefore, we require a certain consistency between them.

In America, it is neither here nor there to affirm the truth that there are no races.

racecraft points to truth about important relationships here, and to terms of human connectedness in our home community that are in reality determinative for all our lives.

talk of color-blindness resonates either as the visionary message of King’s I Have a Dream speech or as...

on the part of self-intereste...

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia, in Africa, in America, and the islands of the sea.”4 While

For some, indeed, the color line was the solution.

For Du Bois, double-consciousness meant an irreducibly complex awareness of himself as his own self, an unsettled and always evolving subject, and at the same time as a despised object, fixed in caricatures, braced for the daily ritual insults of outsider-hood, enduring in all ways what Adolph Reed calls “the ascriptive lot of a racial collectivity.”

The victim will naturally be sought outside, for an outsider is a subject less able to resist; since he is not protected by the fellow-feeling that attaches to a relative or neighbor, nothing about him blocks and neutralizes the bad and destructive feelings aroused by the death.57

It is true that racism is no longer, as in the past, the nuclear weapon of American politics, guaranteed to obliterate an opponent.

During the Jim Crow era, many white voters in the South lost their right to vote under cover of the same laws that disfranchised black voters, while “good government” reform in the North often meant efforts to restrict the popular franchise.

all the claims by white persons to have lost jobs because of preferences for black persons were

valid, every black person would have to be holding down five jobs.)

In a manner of speaking, racecraft steps down the current of macro-economic inequality to suit the small appliances of everyday life and the limited purview of their hard-pressed users.