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Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call "racecraft." And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed. That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.… (more)
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The Fields sisters persuasively argue that race is not a coherent empirical fact, but a concept created via the strange ideological legerdemain they call "racecraft." While race is not real, the racist framework and practice of a double standard based on
This analogy came immediately to my mind when reading Racecraft, which at
To answer this question, they coin the titular neologism, "Racecraft," in direct analogy to "Witchcraft." By this, they are building off of the premodern understanding of a world in which unseen witches are the causal factors behind many seemingly ordinary things. For believers, the idea of witchcraft is an internally coherent ideology that can explain the world, even if it sometimes strains to cohere with external world. The same is true, the authors argue, for "racecraft," the belief that race is real and explains how humans act in the real world — belief in the reality and power of race is just as coherent an ideology, they write, as belief in the reality and power of witches.
The book itself is a collection of essays on a theme, composed over two decades for different mediums: book chapters, academic papers and oral presentations. As such it lacks the focus that a specifically composed book would have; rather than deliberately developing a thesis, the book moves in fits and starts, with the thesis advancing here and there, and other times repeating arguments and examples from earlier chapters. Still, the authors are intelligent and eloquent, and despite the handicap of their chosen medium remain engaging throughout.
This is perhaps not a book for someone completely new to a scholarly study of the topic of race; it often seems to be responding to unexplicated currents in academic discourse. But an intelligence layperson can still easily penetrate its arguments.
Interestingly, it offers no robust direction forward — if race if an illusion, the product of "racecraft," then what are people confronted with a society that takes race seriously to do? Despite the authors' frequent engagement with French scholars, they don't engage with the alternative French model in which race is explicitly ignored. In the conclusion, and bits and pieces throughout, the authors hint that a better solution might be to ignore race in favor of a focus on class as a more real social division, but this thesis is never developed at length.
If one is willing to accept (at least for the sake of argument) this book's premise, that "race" is a myth, this is a thought-provoking tome. It's not as persuasive a polemic as a book composed as a single text would be, but as a collection of intelligent essays it's still thought-provoking at a time when this type of thought is in particular demand.