Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Posted October 23rd, 2012 by Felicia Furman
Category: Living consequences

Felicia Furman is a guest contributor and the producer/director of Shared History, a documentary about historical and contemporary relationships between black and white families connected to a southern plantation.

I’m pleased to introduce the Tracing Center friends and family to a new book entitled Racecraft by my friend and associate Karen Fields and her sister, Columbia University Professor of History Barbara Fields. Karen was the primary academic scholar and “cheerleader” for the production of my film Shared History. During the making of the film, we “came to the table” and formed an enduring friendship forged by our determination to move forward the conversation about the impact of slavery and segregation on our society—and each other—today.

— Felicia Furman

“A most impressive work, tackling a demanding and important topic—the myth that we now live in a post-racial society—in a novel, urgent, and compelling way. The authors dispel this myth by squarely addressing the paradox that racism is scientifically discredited but, like witchcraft before it, retains a social rationale in societies that remain highly unequal and averse to sufficiently critical engagement with their own history and traditions.”
—Robin Blackburn

When Barack Obama won the presidential election nearly four years ago, his victory was said to mark the dawn of a “post-racial” America. And yet as we approached the end of his first term, Trayvon Martin’s murder at the hands of George Zimmerman galvanized the right wing of the country, spurring waves of racist commentary and violent partisan debate. Post-racial, indeed.

Sisters Karen Fields and Barbara Fields tackle the myth of the post-racial era in their incisive and daring Racecraft, a detailed new work intended to fundamentally reorient how we consider the basic social geography of American life. Racecraft’s central metaphor is that race functions in America today similarly to the way in which witchcraft once operated: formally, society agrees that race may be an illusion and that racism is bad, yet it continues to exert a witchcraft-like influence over everything we do, structuring so many of our every day experiences.

Habitually deploying the word “race” as shorthand for any number of social concepts or physical characteristics, Americans lack both the language and the theoretical framework with which to understand racism as it truly manifests. Often, the sisters point out, racecraft obscures pressing social issues by transforming them into questions of black and white.

As recent Census Bureau data belies, the conflict between the ultra-rich and poor has become more pressing than racial tension and friction between immigrants and native-born Americans. Why then, the sisters ask, have we cloaked the stratification of class in our country so effectively? How has racecraft bewitched us to speak of inequality only under the well-tread terms of prejudice and ethnicity?

Approaching this complex topic with ingenuity and wit, the authors expand their theory through a series of collaborative essays approaching history—and thus, racecraft—not as a linear subject, but as one that circuits and overlaps repeatedly.

From highlighting flash-points in the American narrative, they move to a deconstruction of the common metaphors most often deployed in the discussion of race; the volume also includes a revisiting of the great anthropologist E.E. Evans-Prichard and an imagined conversation between the French sociologist Emile Durkheim and W.E.B. Dubois.

Grounded by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields’ accomplishments in their respective fields of history and sociology, Racecraft is a transdisciplinary feat, posed to dramatically alter the conversation about race, inequality and class. Distinct from race and racism, racecraft does not refer to groups or to ideas about groups’ traits, however odd both may appear in close-up. It refers instead to mental terrain and to pervasive belief. Like physical terrain, racecraft exists objectively; it has topographical features that Americans regularly navigate, and we cannot readily stop traversing it. Unlike physical terrain, racecraft originates not in nature but in human action and imagination; it can exist in no other way. The action and imagining are collective yet individual, day-to-day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in mundane routine. The action and imagining emerge as part of moment-to-moment practicality, that is, thinking about and executing every purpose under the sun. Do not look for racecraft, therefore, only where it might be said to “belong.” Finally, racecraft is not a euphemistic substitute for racism. It is a kind of fingerprint evidence that racism has been on the scene.

Our term racecraft invokes witchcraft, though not for the reason that may come first to mind. We regard neither witchcraft nor racecraft as “just mischievous superstition, nothing more,” a position [economist Glenn C. Loury] Loury has rightly dismissed as of little interest. Far from denying the rationality of those who have accepted either belief as truth about the world, we assume it. We are interested in the processes of reasoning that manage to make both plausible. Witchcraft and racecraft are imagined, acted upon, and re-imagined, the action and imagining inextricably intertwined. The outcome is a belief that “presents itself to the mind and imagination as a vivid truth.”

So wrote W. E. H. Lecky, a British scholar of Europe’s past who, looking back from the nineteenth century, tried to understand how very smart people managed for a very long time to believe in witchcraft. He warned that it takes “a strong effort of the imagination … [to] realise the position of the defenders of the belief.” To “realise,” in his sense, 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. What if we Americans applied that “strong effort” to our present? Only if we imagined racecraft as a thing in itself worth scrutiny might we imagine ourselves outside or beyond the belief. It is impossible to understand what “post-racial” might be without first understanding more profoundly than we do at present just what “racial” is.