Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields

A new edition of a celebrated contemporary work on race and racism

Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft ought to be positioned, as Bookforum put it, at the center of any discussion of race in American life.

Most people assume 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, History, Politics, Sociology, Social Justice, Theory

310 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2012

About the author

Karen E. Fields, an independent scholar, holds degrees from Harvard University, Brandeis University, and the Sorbonne. She is the author of many articles and three published books: Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa, about millennarianism; Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (with Mamie Garvin Fields), about life in the 20th-century South; and a retranslation of Emile Durkheim's masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Reviews

[Mike Goldstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars not for the ideas, but for my personal reading experience. The basic ideas here, the way the authors are able to trace the establishment of American racial ideology, the way they explain the impetus for racist pseudo-science, are...well, just look at all the other reviews here. It's all really well done, and the book does a great job of getting at why concepts of "race" are so impervious to factual and logical rebuttals. The ideas will definitely stick with you.

But... I'm sure I'm at the very most casual end of the readership of this book. And for me - frequent, casual reader of academic texts - this wasn't always very fun! If I didn't find the adequate context/related readings/etc necessary to fully engage, that's on me. But the way some of these essays overlapped with each other, the garbled academic language (this book seriously displayed some of the worst habits of academic writing), the detours to take pot shots at other writers all made the read more difficult than it needed to be.

So yeah. Thesis super strong. Arguments utterly unique and compelling. Personal stories evocative and illuminating. Conclusion was a complete rush. 25 pages setting up a 5-page imagined conversation between Emile Durkheim and W.E.B. DuBois, though? I wish someone would've warned me.

[Inna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant work. The authors adopt Durkheimian approach to explain why, even though we all know that race is a cultural construct, it is still such a basic part of American culture. Their point is that since every society needs some basic principles which cannot be questioned to sustain its stability (they compare race in US to witchcraft in Africa) and since race was so basic to US culture, first as justification for slavery and later as a disguise for class, it will take much more than rational analysis to make such a principle disappear. Largely since, no matter what people say, racial differences in US and witchcraft in Africa seem so sensible, even if people would not admit to it. To address the evolving resistance towards racism in US, according to the authors, developed something they call racecraft - ways to address race, whatever it might be, in a racist way, specifically in the context of Afro-Americans, so that it will not sound racist, but an objective evaluation. In this context they analyze both everyday and scientific discourses.
The authors, while dealing with their main topic, address several other interesting issues like the workings of ideology and different ways to handle interviews for historical research.

[Conor Ahern · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful and highly intelligent exploration of the idea that racecraft is no more legitimate than witchcraft, and that the racism that follows from it is no more natural or explicable than the development of superstitions and punishments that flowed from centuries of adamant belief in witchcraft. It's a helpful heuristic--witchcraft makes sense to a group of people in search of explanations for complex, inexplicable phenomena. Witchcraft is rife with contradictions, completely fabricated justifications, and harmful consequences, and once removed from its orbit, we see how utterly silly the belief therein so clearly was. But if we know that race is a fiction, then why do we still cling to, legitimate, and accept the myriad contradictions, poisons, and atavisms that flow therefrom through the discredited concepts of "race" and "racism"?

This book probably posed more questions than answers, and it definitely made me question whether seeing injustice through a racial lens is productive or regressive over the long run.

[David Selsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book. I recommend it. However, I don’t like all the essays equally. This a collection of essays Karen and Barbara Fields wrote over many years. I just flipped through the book to see if I could find which author wrote which essay and it’s not readily apparent. I’m guessing Karen wrote some and Barbara wrote some but maybe they wrote them all together the way Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels write essays together. Whatever the case, some of the essays are fantastic. Some of them drag a little bit because the topic being explored is arcane. There was an essay about Emile Durkheim and W.E.B. DuBois that went on and on. In instances like that (when I’m reading a scholar’s work that goes on and on not very interestingly) I’m thinking either a) exploring the minutiae of this topic (or in this case the relationship between two thinkers) would be fascinating if I knew and/or cared more about the topic at hand, or b) The authors, in this case the Fields, aren’t doing a good job of making a topic or area of interest to them interesting to the lay reader who doesn’t share their unabiding passion for the topic. Whatever the case, there were more than a couple essays in the book where my attention drifted and I forced myself to finish the essay out of a dislike of quitting.

The real highlights are the essays in which they focus on their theory of racecraft. This is top-shelf thinking. Let’s start at the beginning. Everyone knows race is constructed. Or perhaps, everyone should know race is constructed; or to put it another way, race is a construct. In other words, human beings have no genetic differences between them when human beings are captured as groups (read races). There is no genetic nor other scientific rationale for the way races are organized qua races. One more time: there has been a consensus in the scientific community since at least the 1970s that no ascriptive group (this is the term Adolph Reed Jr. uses to specify there is no substantive way to identify the group in question as a group other than the “just so” characteristic(s) one is attributing to the group) differs genetically from any other ascipritive group. In fact, there is more genetic variance among members of an ascriptive group (African American, White, Native American, Latinx, Asian, Northern European, Pacific-Islander, South Asian) than there is between members of different ascriptive groups. So whatever the ascriptive group in question is (see groups in previous sentence), the manner in which they have been captured as a group is the result of man-made, historically contingent factors.

So far, so good. To put it simply: we’re all just humans. None of us are genetically predisposed as members of man-made, historically contingent ascriptive groups to be smarter, better athletes, better leaders, more articulate, harder workers, better parents, worse parents, better husbands, worse husbands, better at science, better at writing, natural leaders, natural followers, and on and on. We are all just human. What I have just written seems so quaint as to feel nostalgic. Which is a big part of the problem. The only locale on the political spectrum where you will hear people saying things like, “I try not to think about race,” and “I think we’re all alike,” and “the more you talk about race, the more you divide us” is the Right. We’ll come back to this; there’s a way to circle back to this circumstance as part of a coherent investigation. The point for now is that science has proven what we think of as races, or more politely as cultures, are nothing more and nothing less than historically contingent creations.

The racecraft of the title is the sleight of hand whereby these historically contingent groupings of humans are reified into “races.” If humans are all just humans then what’s the point of even talking about them as races. We don’t group people by the color of their hair, or the color of their eyes, or the width of their lips, or their height, of the straightness of their teeth. Why do we group them by the color of their skin? To quote Ta-Nehisi quotes, “Racism is the father or race.” Which means, that the exploitation of the group comes first-- “Blacks,” “Asians,” whoever--and after that comes the reification of that ascriptive group as a race. Most of the Fields’ scholarship focuses on the experience of Black people in the United States. For the purposes of a short book review, I’ll summarize the Fields’ project as identifying the times and ways in which “Blacks” are reified as a group in the United States. All sorts of mischief comes as a result of this reification, the most significant and permanent being the manner in which all manner of characteristics, traits, and tendencies have been glued onto “black” people as if these characteristics, traits, and tendencies had an endogenic origin as opposed to all of them being exogenic disciplinary formulations arising and mutating as a result of discrete, historical contingencies. Ergo, race comes from racism.

There are several fantastic essays in which the Fields detail and trace the mischief that arises when these characteristics, traits, and tendencies are alchemized into American society’s understanding of the “Black” race. It’s excellent writing, but even more than that it’s excellent thinking. The Fields at their best remind me of Foucault: drawing stark, powerful counter-intuitive conclusions. Based on the few times I’ve heard Adolph Reed Jr. reference the Fields, I’m assuming they’re friends. Reed makes similarly powerful conclusions in his writing. What lurks just below the snark and disdain that periodically bubble up in the writing of the Fields and Reed is an anger at the fundamental racism involved in all reification of “Black” life, even when it’s done in good faith, even when it’s articulated by Black people themselves: Black pride, Black and beautiful, African American Studies, the Black electorate, Black movements, etc. Many of the best passages in the Fields’ essays are implicitly concerned with strengthening the notion that there are no such things as Black people and we are all humans and need to be understood and respected in all our individuated humanity. There is a sneaky bit of racecraft smuggled in every time a human is not comprehended in his or her full complicated, heterodox humanity but first understood and objectified as part of an ascriptive group.

To elaborate on what I wrote earlier about the political locales where certain “race talk” is accepted, the fact is the circles where race is most reified these days is in Left circles. The different movements and disciplines that have proliferated in the last several decades--Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, the instutionalization of the anti-racist, systemic racism NGO-industrial complex--have created a climate where commentators on Fox or other right-wing outlets are the only places arguing we shouldn’t see race and that consistently focusing on race is divisive. Call this MLK anti-racism. The anti-racist NGO-complex tell us we need to see the racism that is everywhere, we must see race everywhere, we must respect each other’s racial differences at all times, that certain racial experiences give us more or less privilege to speak, and that whiteness is centered everywhere; in other words, the words of MLK and the sentiments therein were only a proclamation of where we need to go but American society has fallen short to the degre racial disparities continue to exist in every metric by which a healthy, productive life is measured. I know, I know, wait up, you’re thinking; anytime we hear Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Dennis Prager or anyone else in the Fox News orbit speaking about race we need to immediately question whether the argument is being made in good faith and be suspicious of empirical data they paper over or distort to make whatever point they’re trying to make about race. For example, and to change registers, I saw Tucker Carlson present a masterful take-down on corporate Dems for their dissembling, hypocrisy, contradiction-laden arguments, and general fecklessness for their attempt to derail and malign Bernie’s campaign at every turn. Now was his soliloquy accurate? Yes, it was spot on. Was it made in good faith? Hell, no. If things had turned out differently and Bernie were the nominee this fall, Tucker and his associates would have red-baited Bernie in the most outlandish, untethered-from-reality manner possible. A trickier question is whether it even matters that Tucker’s commentary in Bernie’s defense wasn’t in good faith.

My point in this detour is to show that the place we want to get to is where we do in fact see each other as our fellow humans. The fact we have been socialized not to see one another that way and that we have internalized whole suites of stereotypes and impressions about different asciptive groups is not reason to abandon either actions or rhetoric that further a project of understanding and relating to one another as “just” our fellow humans. One of the powerful, counter-intuitive points the Fields and scholars like Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, and Benn Michaels make is that clear-eyed, analytic and coherent arguments about race are not always, and often not, within the purview of the Left. Just because conservative commentators need a history and economics lesson about the history of convict-leasing, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement, redlining, and the ways in which universal, federal programs of the past and means-tested programs of the present fall short to rectify centuries of racial violence doesn’t mean liberal commentators are necessarily and always heading in the right direction when they double-down on the reification of race (even when made in good faith to counter hegemonic racist tendencies).

I can’t remember to what extent the Fields discuss the issue of race-reductionism obscuring political economy but other scholars who are interested in a universal, redistributive project have used the work of the Fields to bolster their arguments (read Reed Jr., Johnson, Benn Michaels.) It’s ironic that the first time I came across the Fields’ names was reading Coates (I think he referenced Barbara Fields in BTTAM; maybe not). Anyway, there is that line in Coates’s book that racism is the father of race. The irony is there is a contradiction in Coates’s text he doesn’t really try to resolve. Namely, he takes pride in being a member of a subaltern group. At various times in the text he problematizes the concept of “whiteness” and “blackness” either by putting them in scare quotes or repeatedly speaking about white people who think they are white. At other points in the book he speaks of the solidarity black people have with one another. I understand that sentiment and it’s a righteous sentiment any member of a marginalized group feels toward other members of their marginalized group, be they Jews, Latinx or women. The contradiction is consistently having it both ways: the questioning and problematizing and noting of the mischief that is always present when an ascriptive group is reified while also taking pride in, speaking on behalf of, and advancing the priorities of that ascriptive group. Perhaps it’s not a significant contradiction in BTWAM, a book that has very little to say about capital accumulation and the project of a class politics, but it does become a contradiction if you’re trying to build a broad-based, multi-racial working-class coalition. That is, the degree to which the focus is on racial disparities and the racism that is their etiology is the degree to which this framework obscures the role capitalism and the neo-liberal order is the larger problem that needs to be attacked to rectify social ills. And in fairness to Coates maybe it’s less of a contradiction than an intractable double-bind of this particular historical moment: we should want to break free from seeing each other through a racial lens but until we can we will take pride in our racial differences not only for self-understanding and edification, but also for psychic protection.

[Tatiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be very abstract in terms of how to apply the ideas and to which situations they can be used. It isnt until the last chapter where the authors give explicit examples of racecraft + class inequality and how racecraft is employed to prevent progress.

I would've liked this approach to have been used throughout the book and not just in the end.

I am also surprised that many leftists who reject identity politics havent gravitated to this book and its themes. It's not really "class first" but she is arguing that racecraft is used as a way to obscure class for everyone and renders only Black people poor. So when you try to fight inequality, you bring up Black people, and since white people are racist these initiatives get derailed. It also prevents white people from having the language to talk about their experiences with inequality.

I listened to this on audio - Karen Chilton is a perfect narrator - but I would need to read this multiple times.

I have begun thinking about how a lot of "anti racist" Black people (and their allies) are race hustlers who engage in anti Blackness, ahistorial or revisitionist readings of history to substantiate their claims about race. In fact, by rejecting racecraft, a certain type of Black person would see it as racist. In many ways, Black people are even more beholden to these ideas than white people.

Worthwhile read.

[Richard S · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has a very interesting take on racism, one that is very different from the other books I've been reading. Unfortunately it comes across mostly as very garbled, academic and unconvincing. It basically says we agree that bioracism is factually wrong and indefensible as a coherent idea, but it argues that the way to attack racism is to attack the concept of race. To call race a social construct like Kendi does is racism because it requires us to treat races differently. As a result it's kind of like a book in denial. The authors are historians who look back at the past and see the class influence that was part of racism in the deep South, but they overemphasizes this aspect when talking about today. They don't seem to understand that racism has changed, which is the brilliance of the Kendi book.

Their one very good and relevant point is that since racism is based on a lie about race, invoking race can create something called "racecraft". This racecraft is everywhere, it's difficult to avoid, and they find it in supreme court decisions, New York Times editorials, in affirmative action (which they are against). So the book is weirdly "conservative" in some ways (although the authors are Afro-American), but very sincerely against racism. This is a great point, but very much at odds with how the world is working. For example they believe that "diversity" is a racist idea. Basically they want us to reach Kendi's ideal world of race as a non-factor, but do not acknowledge the racism inherent in the system that needs to be addressed first.

The overt and terrible racism of Jim Crow is nothing like today. Why can't anyone acknowledge that progress has been made? The book is pessimistic that we can move beyond the social construct, but to me it seems inevitable in a few generations.

Anyway, the book seems too much on the fringe to recommend other than as a historical guide to racism in the past. They are far better historians than Kendi, who is full of misleading errors, but are not as much in the real world.

[YBV · Rating 4 out of 5]

Race relations as an analysis of society takes for granted that race is a valid empirical datum and thereby shifts attention from the actions that constitute racism—enslavement, disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, massacres, and pogroms—to the traits that constitute race.

What a brilliant book. Coming from the French education system, I've always been somewhat skeptical of the way American popular discourse approaches the concept of "race" (while also steering clear of the full Frenchie colorblindness, often a cover for racism that is well alive in practice). The Fields sister proposed a clear analysis and critique of race, racism, and racecraft, one that at no point understates the violence of racism in the United States, while also urging readers to recognize the extant racecraft in American society and identify the social realities it creates and obscures. The books highlights the importance of bringing class and social inequality into the conversation (oft-evaded topics), while also illustrating clearly what racecraft does to the lives of Afro-Americans.

I majored in History and enjoyed the history essays more than sociology ones, but both were really thought-provoking (Durkheim in conversation with Du Bois? What a concept.) Really dig the occasional hot takes on trends in scholarship related to the use of oral "history," hyperindividualist articles about the agency of the downtrodden, subaltern cultural expression.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

So here's the thing: I really liked this book overall and think its arguments are important. However, there were a few passages that made me question a lot of the others. For instance, the authors completely misrepresent scholars who study Black English (or AAVE) and then destroy the (racist) straw man they've created. They come back to this two or three times. It may seem like a minor thing, but it made me question their representation of their opponents in other areas, as well. As a result, I want to engage more with this book and its claims, but hesitate to accept some of the premises, which makes engagement more difficult.

Still a worthwhile read, especially for the historical chapter, which is mind-blowingly good.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

easily worth about 1000 stars, or even a million... if you can read this book and not get totally fucking pissed off about America's racist problem (not racisM problem, mind you) then you are in such a state of ignorance and/or denial that you are most likely not human at all... this book crushes all the preconceived notions people have about "race" that it is impossible to even conceive of ever using the term except as a way of designating the user as a racist, par excellence... an essential book about where America is, and, more importantly, how it got here... no advice for getting away from it, just a truckload of evidence that racists made race, not the other way around... everyone should read this book, and discuss its contents, for a long time...

[Charlise Randall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by 2 sisters who are professors. Essentially equates how we view Race and its perceived realness to the way people viewed witchcraft, seldom questioning the actual mechanism/connection between race and outcomes. (i.e. black men are violent. well what exactly is it about blackness that makes them violent?) There were no witches in Salem yet droves of people were accused and killed for witchcraft just as race is not real yet people (black people in particular) are targeted for it because of how we have created and recreated the construct so frequently that it is perceived as concrete. Not to mention the baseless scientific studies that were done to “prove” its validity. Very dense and academic but changed the way I view race completely.

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are very few books that I can put in the place in which I put this book. For me, the entire conversation around race is now clear. Racism produces race, not vice versa. Furthermore, and a very problematic conclusion, race is an ideology (that's what racecraft means). As an ideology, we can only give life to it, if we continue to give life to it. So for me, this is an amazing piece of work. It should be the starting point for any discussion on Race.

[Kyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a book that we should have read in college, this book has enhanced my knowledge on more than my white male perspective.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful essays on race. Some are a bit too academic, but very worthwhile

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Fields' conception of racecraft, akin to witchcraft in how its rationalisation of thoroughly irrational social practices, aptly argues that race is a social phenomena produced by racism, rather than racism being produced by a innately real existence of race. I found the anecdotal method through which the Fields' presented their argument to be helpful - although at times it did obscurify the content, and even with this anecdotal method the articles are still plagued with elements of academic tones that contrast the seeming purpose of the book.

Some articles were also better than others. Chapters 1 and 4 would rightly be described as essential reading; on the other hand, chapter 8 (a speculative conversation between Durkheim and Du Bois) seemed to add very little and lacked the critical edge of the other essays.

[Jessica Mae Stover]

Reading chapter 7 as an excerpt/essay because I’m interested in which pseudoscience you’re allowed to challenge, and which you’re not, particularly in progressive women’s spaces:

Witchcraft and Racecraft: Invisible Ontology in Its Sensible Manifestations

[andré crombie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational “evidence” disprove it. Witchcraft in such a society is as self-evident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. To someone looking in from outside, however, explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce race day in and day out as Americans do. Ideologies do not need to be plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see—ritually, repetitively—on a daily basis.

Notes: The best and most useful book about race and racism I’ve ever read.

On what’s needed: “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. Once everyone understands that African descent is not race and that African ancestry differs from others only in the racism with which Euro-America has stigmatized it, the problem changes: what is needed is not a more varied set of words and categories to represent racism but a politics to uproot it.”

On race being a product of racism (featuring a Du Bois quote I think of often): “Race as identity breaks down on the irreducible fact that any sense of self intrinsic to persons of African descent is subject to peremptory nullification by forcible extrinsic identification. Such nullification occurs when police officers shoot an unarmed black civilian or, even more flagrantly, when they shoot a black fellow officer, their identification of him as a black man—and, ipso facto, a candidate for summary execution—lethally overriding his self-definition as a policeman. Whatever Afro-American people’s identity may be (and a well-argued recent article proposes doing away with the concept altogether14), it cannot be equated with their race. After years of probing them for something of value or use, W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated all efforts to define race as a characteristic or attribute of its victims, whether the definition hinged on biology, culture, or identity (supposing “identity” to mean an individual’s or a group’s sense of self). The black man is not someone of a specified ancestry or culture, he decided, and certainly not someone who so identifies himself. A black man “is a person who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.”

07/17/20:

“The more dutifully scholars acknowledge that the concept of race belongs in the same category as geocentrism or witchcraft, the more blithely they invoke it as though it were both a coherent analytical category and a valid empirical datum. In place of Jefferson’s moment of impassioned truth-telling, his successors fall back on italics or quotation marks, typographical abbreviations for the trite formula, ‘race is a social construction.’ The formula is meant to spare those who invoke race in historical explanation the raised eyebrows that would greet someone who, studying a crop failure, proposed witchcraft as an independent variable. But identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters. The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies. Scholars who intone ‘social construction’ as a spell for the purification of race do not make clear—perhaps because they do not themselves realize—that race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. 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.”

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half of this book is excellent, laying out helpful definitions and distinctions of "race," "racism," and "racecraft" (think "witchcraft" with its irrational premise but utterly rational consequences). The second half is overly theoretical for my taste, spending a lot of time on the obscure conceptual and linguistic formulations of these ideas. It is academic writing, which is not my cup of tea.

The torrid conclusion is a welcome coda, and it reads almost as manifesto. The last paragraph especially is eerily prescient. They couldn't have guessed that Donald Trump would be the form in which racecraft manifested, but judging by this they were certainly not surprised that his tactics succeeded (written in 2012):

. . . Like the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street caught the imagination of a broad public convinced that the economic system is rigged against them. Unlike the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street broke the taboo against making an explicit issue of inequality. It is too soon to know whether the taboo has been broken for now, let alone broken for good, or whether raising the cry of "class warfare" in defense of the well-heeled few will prove effective in reinstating it. It seems unlikely that persons whose salaries, benefits, and retirement are under siege, whose mortgages are underwater, and who live in fear of being laid off. . . will easily accept a portrait of high-flying financiers and overpaid CEOs as job creators or as creators of wealth for anyone other than themselves. But unlike arguments for the benefits of inequality, racecraft does not depend on plausibility for its effectiveness. A presidential candidate's equation of "redistribution" with "redistribution to black people" and the effort to discredit a generation of laws against racist discrimination suggest that defenders of inequality may yet find the old-time religion -- racecraft -- to be a very present help amid awkward questions.(my emphasis)

I would recommend this to people interested in a conceptual, linguistic and theoretical understanding of racism, and to those who don't mind academic writing.

Not Bad Reviews

@pointblaek

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dangerous lies do not always dress the part.

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 the ideology of race is very real. Racism is an active social practice that takes for granted that race exists, thereby creating the latter in an act of imagination and social belief—an act of racecraft. This thesis forms the backbone of a series of essays that touch on history, sociology, philosophy, genetics, and many other disciplines. The only thing that kept Racecraft from garnering five stars was that the book was somewhat front-loaded. The best essays were the first ones, making the sociological chapters on Durkheim, Du Bois, and witchcraft seem a letdown. This is not to say that they weren't interesting or compelling in their own right, only that they seemed underwhelming coming off the heals of the chapters on slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow, and C. Vann Woodward. In spite of this minor quibble, the book was certainly the most persuasive text on inequality and racism that I've read in years. Highly recommended.

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was hoping this would be a singular work, rather than an essay collection, but I nonetheless found it engaging. The Fields sisters present a fairly original (to my knowledge) argument with their concept of 'racecraft' in which race is "not real" in a stronger sense than many would argue, and downstream from racism. I would have liked the book to more explicitly address affirmations of Black identity like various Black left-nationalisms, because I think that complicates the argument a bit (though I'm not sure exactly how). Overall, though, I think the concept of racecraft is useful, and I found many of the arguments compelling.

[Mike Benoit · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. I see our world more clearly for having read this.

[Zain · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this book is that race, much like witchcraft, operates socially as a collective experience in which individuals and societies take part in the various rites, rituals and ceremonies that constitute a belief system. These belief systems then become self-perpetuating in that they affirm and reaffirm these concepts which do not stand up to scrutiny but nonetheless may be rooted in reason, in the sense that the belief in spirits and witchcraft reveal much about the way people experience and make sense of the spaces they inhabit. This an interesting starting point for exploring the theme of race not as a biological reality, but as an illusion that has been conjured up to justify racism.

The process of becoming a race - or being ascribed and racialised as one - has created a a political, economic, social and cultural environment where the immutability of race is seen to dominate the way that societies - and groups living within these structures - come to view and experience each other (an exploration of Du Bois’s double-consciousness and Durkheim’s individuality highlight these points).

Seeing race, the authors argue, conceals the many processes that perpetuate race as a construct and disguise the root of this ideology or belief system: it isn’t race that created racism, but rather racism that continues to create and propagate the idea of race.

Whilst little in their analysis of race is novel, some of the essays do encourage readers to think about the different ways we use race, and what it is we mean when we talk about race relations and whether this is necessarily an ideal starting point to deconstruct race, or whether by viewing races as an indisputable norm, we are complicit in the continued propagation of this illusion.

The fragmented nature of this collection of essays, as well as the very abstract way it deals with race without its application in today’s world (for example, unseeing race does not mitigate against the continuing oppression and inequalities created by racism and the political institutions that promote these differences), makes this an underwhelming contribution to this field. The fact that the writing traverses several academic disciplines can mean that the overall thesis in this book can be lost in prose that is at times difficult to navigate as a reader.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very interesting commentary on racism in America today (and I suppose in other Western democracies). It equates our understanding of racism to "racecraft" or rather like witchcraft. How opinions of earlier Americans viewed witchcraft as this bizarre and unnatural thing, and used it to demonize behaviors that did not fit with their agenda (mainly Puritans I'd imagine).

So the book does a lot of good in that regard. I especially liked the authors retelling of their grandmother's story, where she walked the baby carriage around everyday in South Carolina and the white officer politely nodded, assuming she was walking around a white baby. Then, upon realizing the baby was black and not white, the indignation he felt and the grandmother not being angry because she recognized he was not so much mad at her, as much as he was acting his part as a piece in that Jim Crow structured society. It was more that the wealthy white aristocrat would be angry with the policeman if he did not enforce the societal norms.

Essentially, the book is about power. I find it interesting because unlike the other books that deal with racism today (How to be Anti-Racist and Me and White Supremacy come to mind), it makes the argument that racism is embedded within our society, but mostly as a means to serve the elite. Whereas the other books argue racism is embedded in society, benefits all white people, and you're racist if you are white. I noticed this quite clearly since "Me and White Supremacy" I read right before this book, and while Saad (author of said book), spent every few pages telling the reader they were a fragile white supremacist, Fields was mostly focused on demonstrating why racecraft exists in our society and why it is so effective.

That said, it gets 3 stars because of the writing. It's very academic and hard to follow at times. The section of Du Bois and Durkheim could have been very interesting, but it seemed so pointless to me, I ended up skipping to the conclusion (which was very good).

Also I got this on kindle via the library, so the conclusion had no page numbers and that was mildly annoying. Could be a me thing though. It would be a better book if they hired a better writer to convey these ideas in an easier way.

[Cris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book isn't just a challenge to racists, it's a challenge to: 1) Any attempt to define a human being by the concept of race and; 2) Any explanation that implies racism is a product of "race" or some other purported natural cause. Karen and Barbara fields argue the concept of "race" would not exist if it weren't for racism and modern attempts to find a scientific basis for race or to create a taxonomy of "races" are better understood as a renewal of the bio-racism and eugenics of the 19th and 20th century. Race, therefore, is the core concept of racism, a grotesque fiction that nonetheless has penetrated all aspects of everyday society in a very real way, and racism, which is better viewed as an action or a rationale -- something an aggressor *does*--, is a monstrous crime against humanity that's changed the course of human history.

On the surface the book's analysis may seem uncontroversial, yet it often crashes headfirst into a lot of everyday notions where the "fact" of race has been accepted and the reduction or classification of people in accordance to race still occurs unblinkingly, often times masked as post-racial progressiveness, often times utilized as a way to redirect talk about the true source of social inequalities. Karen and Barbara Fields argue these notions aren't simply the terrain of racists, but an ideological illusion or chimera of sorts bought into by most of society that's continuously re-imagined and reproduced in daily life, what they coin as "racecraft." Understanding why this ideology persists today and how to prevent it from marching on into the future requires a deep understanding of history, a careful probing of what's real and what's made up, and an honest investigation into how economic inequality gets reproduced and justified by the ruling class. The ultimate claim is that without rooting out "racecraft", society will forever fail to tackle problems of inequality.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has repositioned by outlook on race entirely. "The fish will be the last to discover water." It's hard to see what we are all swimming in, and in the this case, in the U.S., it is Racecraft. There is so much taken for granted, when the road out begins with the question: what is race? In one hand it is an abstract made-up, and in the next moment it's somehow a biological reality. The authors reveal the quick hands of Racecraft, the invisible and moving rules by which it is followed. I'm quite floored by it all.

"Once everyone understands that African descent is not race and that African ancestry differs from others only in the racism with which Euro-America has stigmatized it, the problem changes: what is needed is not a more varied set of words and categories to represent racism but a politics to uproot it."

Not only is this nonsense practiced in the open but it obscures the larger criticism when the racial lenses are the only ones being used, "'discrimination' shoves 'unfairness' out of the vocabulary available for public debate."

Now I did walk briskly through a couple chapters which I found more challenging (the Durkheim-Du Bois conversation). These tasted a bit more academic and I struggled to clearly understand how exactly all the words fit with each other. That's for me reading above my level I suppose. Still, I'm enormously grateful for the slew of examples, and the walking with hand through the matter, and I am looking forward to revisiting the book or reading articles and other words from the authors.

[Nicolas Lontel · Rating 2 out of 5]

D'entrée de jeu, je dois avouer qu'avec la quatrième de couverture, je pensais très fort qu'il s'agissait d'un ouvrage de droite ou d'extrême droite qui pense qui nier une dimension raciale effacerait le racisme (avec une pensée universaliste etc.). Comme je ne trouvais rien sur Internet (et que sur Goodreads toutes les critiques étaient positives), je me suis "sacrifier" pour le lire et voir ce qu'il en était et si c'était un livre qu'on voulait recommander ou non en librairie.

Finalement, malgré une critique très forte d'un ou deux points de l'ouvrage, il ne s'agit pas de la thèse de droite, il s'agit d'une exploration historique qui montre comment a été crée la "race", comment des scientifiques ont essayer de fabriquer ce concept toujours de manière complètement bancale, les lois et les problèmes de ces lois qui ont suivis et une très bonne démonstration de comment la race est absolument construite, qu'il n'y a absolument aucune réalité identifiable derrière cette idée et que tout ce concept est néfaste et que le concept de race ne fait que servir le racisme (et non le contraire). On se montre en continuité complète avec W.E.B. Du Bois là-dessus (et il est amplement convoqué) qui finit par comprendre qu'une idée de la race n'est pas une couleur de peau, une identité, une généalogie, une culture, etc., mais simplement que « Je le reconnais très facilement et avec une pleine sanction légale : le Noir est la personne qui monte dans des wagons ‘Jim Crow’ en Géorgie » (passage de Du Bois cité dans l'essai).

[Je lisais cet essai en même temps que j'ai entendu les propos de Whoopi Goldberg à la télévision puis ses "excuses" qui n'en était pas au show de Stephen Colbert ; elle devrait définitivement lire cet essai parce qu'en effet, selon la thèse des autrices, elle ne fait que reconduire une forme de racisme en le figeant dans une constitution qu'elle pense réelle, mais dont elle n'est plus capable de sortir ou de comprendre comment il est crée en premier lieu d'où le pourquoi elle n'est pas en mesure de comprendre comment les Juifs peuvent être considéré aussi comme une 'race"]

Pourquoi le terme de Racecraft? Parce que les autrices tracent des parallèles que cette construction fictive de la race qui fait apparaître une fausse réalité de personnes racisées est identique à l'idée de sorcellerie et de la pensée circulaire derrière ces manifestations. Je ne résumerais pas tout l'argumentaire, une des deux autrices a largement travaillé sur ces questions et l'argument est tout à fait recevable et intéressant.

Avant ma grosse critique de l'essai, je soulignerais enfin que j'ai été super super fan de la discussion fictive entre Du Bois et Émile Durkheim à la fin de l'ouvrage qui permettait de "tester" les idées des deux philosophes et de comprendre où la pensée peut mener lorsqu'elle est critiquée et amener à échanger avec d'autres. Pour avoir lu les deux auteurs (bien que cela fait un moment), c'est absolument génial comme prosopopée et elle est très naturelle et bien menée. C'était mon passage préféré de l'essai bien que je peux comprendre que ça en a probablement perdu plusieurs.

Maintenant, il y a un point fondamental que l'essai choisit ouvertement d'ignorer dans cette conversation et semble même faire complètement fausse route à ce niveau. C'est l'idée que l'universalisme (à la française) règlera les problèmes de la création de la race, c'est d'ailleurs une des pistes de solution mentionné dans une phrase au début de l'ouvrage (je ne retrouve pas la citation exacte, je pensais qu'elle était autour de la page 78, mais je ne le retrouve pas). On vient même à se moquer ouvertement des départements de "race theory" qui aiderait à prolonger l'idée de race et contribuer au racisme dans une autre phrase, complètement isolée, sans justification, sans rien pour appuyer. Il va sans dire que je suis en désaccord avec cette idée: en rendant illégale la compilation de statistiques dites raciales (aussi stupides soient les mesures de cette "race", nous sommes d'accord à ce niveau), la France réussit à nier les problèmes de racisme, n'a pas à les adresser et ne connaît pas les résultats de ses politiques sur des pans de la population en proie au racisme qui survit très très bien malgré que la "race" est soi-disant interdite en France. Je me permets aussi de critiquer cette moquerie des départements universitaires, c'est plutôt, à mon avis, un des lieux les plus critique du mot employé, par manque d'autres. Aussi, les autrices évitent complètement de parler du concept de "personnes racisées" bien qu'une bonne partie du vocabulaire autour de la "race" et de la "couleur" est passé au peigne fin (ou alors il y a eu un pépin avec la traduction). On sent qu'il y a là plutôt un inachèvement de la pensée ou encore un refus d'aller dans les complexités et les ramifications de ce que tout l'effacement du vocabulaire de la "race" entraîne et on ne propose pas d' "utopie" réaliste pour y parvenir ce qui est très regrettable à mon avis.

Je réitère que l'essai est savamment écrit, je ne suis pas du tout expert· de ces questions bien que je lis sur le sujet et je trouve les démonstrations des thèses des autrices impeccables. Je trouve juste regrettable (et il s'agit de deux phrase dans tout l'essai: deux phrases) avec le manque de vision plus large des conséquences ou de la louange d'un universalisme qui n'est pas débarrassé de son racisme.

(Aussi, une dernière petite phrase en note de bas de page qui m'a fait hurler p.289, vraiment, pilonner tous les textes d'un auteur, même hyper raciste? Pourtant, l'essai est constitué, historicisé et permis justement parce qu'on a des traces de ces discours et des écrits sur lesquels se baser pour comprendre l'évolution du concept de la "race" ; pilonner les textes, c'est empêcher l'écriture de Racecraft. S'il s'agit d'une plaisanterie, elle est de mauvais goût.)

[Jaz Boon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading works like this are a joy because it shows the depth of intellect and talent that resides in black women. Racecraft really challenges our concepts of race and racism. What the Fields duo makes clear is that racism gave rise to race and, thus, our focus on race often obscures and/or sanitizes racist actions and impact. At times the book becomes a bit difficult to understand maybe too academic, but overall it is an enlightening read. I don’t think I will ever talk about race and racism the same way as Racecraft gives the tools to see beyond the “rational ”explanations for race to the racism present beneath.

[Mark Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the overall theme of the book is laudable, the writing style leaves much to be desired. Slogging through this tome is like driving a Ferrari on a washboard road full of ruts and potholes. Any enthusiasm for the experience is quickly dampened by ambiguous wandering sentences that completely halt the flow of the narrative. Eventually I pulled off to the side of the road, hailed a taxi and moved on to my next book.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of cobbles together many previously-published essays, so there's a lot of repetition of the central argument -- the idea that racism created and continues to create race, and not the reverse. A very important argument, but you really only need to read one or two essays to grasp probably 85% of the substance of this collection.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of those books where once you finish you start seeing evidence for the main argument (as a collection of essays this book has many, but its most compelling + recurrent is that certain liberal anti-racism discourses reproduce the logics of race science by mistaking the effects of racism for the inborn characteristics of race) nearly everywhere you look.

[Jake Sauce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable clarity and research. Hugely helpful distinction between "race" a pseudo-scientific justification for *racism* - the real structures and practices of oppression, and "racecraft" - the art and practice, like witchcraft, of producing "race" as a socially valid category. Can't recommend this one enough.