Jotted here are some excerpts, notes and musings from Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by the Fields’ sisters.
In addition to these scribblings, an entire chapter titled Of Rogues and Geldings is published over at Class Letter.
Ha, hilarious vindication
“Pronouncing himself “inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa,” Watson said that “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas testing says not really.” Indeed, in his view, reason is not properly regarded as “some universal heritage of humanity.” For evidence, however, the man of science resorted to personal impressions, haphazardly collected: “People who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” From his digest of anecdotes, he went on to prophesy that genetic evidence for black people’s lesser intelligence would emerge within a decade.
But a statement does not acquire validity because a duly ordained scientist utters it. The sirens went off immediately. Certain of Watson’s fellow molecular biologists took the floor with a scientifically correct formulation: It was “not possible to draw such conclusions from the work that has been done on DNA.” Dr. Venter, who happened to be traveling in the United Kingdom at the same time, said, “There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin colour will be predictive of intelligence.” For his part, Watson did not defend himself by citing his own scientific work to date or anyone else’s. Reporters later observed that he at first denied what he had said, and seemed stunned. Perhaps a pre-scientific layer of his mind had taken over momentarily.
Not all who piled onto Dr. Watson can claim to differ fundamentally from him. Shortly after he published his own genome online, scientists at Iceland’s deCode Genetics startled the world with a revelation. Watson had “16 times more genes of black origin than the average white European—16 percent rather than the 1 percent that most of his origin” would have. “This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African.” In other words, Dr. Watson is someone whom nineteenth-century census takers would have classified as an octoroon if they had been able to see behind appearance”
These folks are often explicit about their intentions!
“A year before publication, Charles Murray contributed a raise-the-alarm piece to the Wall Street Journal about “the coming white underclass.” Burdened with unemployment, illegitimacy, jail—in short, telltale exudations of class in America, not race—Murray’s white underclass was identical to its black counterpart. What is more, Murray and Herrnstein made no bones about their scientifico-ideological agenda, to counteract the “perversions of the egalitarian ideal that beg[a]n with the French Revolution.””
““Minority” ranks alongside “the color of their skin” as a verbal prop for the mental trick that turns racism into race. The word slips its literal meaning as well as its core definition, which is quantitative. Vice President Spiro Agnew once demonstrated the trick unconsciously. Responding to a question about American policy toward the white supremacist regime in what was then Rhodesia, he said it was no business of the United States how other countries dealt with their “minorities,” by which he meant the country’s black majority.”
““Indefensible from any point of view,” declared Drew who, after returning to Howard University, took part in the fight against the exclusion of black people from donating blood. If wartime sacrifice was every citizen’s duty, then giving blood was every citizen’s right. The campaigners won the point after a fashion, but the “victory” gave rise to blood labeling by race. The fight and its outcome soured Afro-Americans on blood donation for years thereafter. Scudder, who took over after Drew’s departure, presided over the logistics, sane and insane, of managing America’s stored blood in the war emergency. The insane logistics ranged from designating separate refrigerators (or labeled shelves therein) and separate days for black donors, to “do you mind?” queries addressed to transfusion patients. (Landsteiner, settled in the United States since 1922, must have felt like an Extraterrestrial.) Not until 1950, the year in which Drew died tragically, did the Red Cross announce that it had stopped the practice of segregating blood. John Scudder added his own chapter to the ancient metaphysics of blood. At an annual convention of blood bankers in 1959, he and a Canadian colleague unveiled a “new philosophy” of racial blood that applied the blood-race equation to blood transfusion.”
A short story about the absurdity, the confusion, the disembodiment that is born from the metaphysics of race
When my son Rob was small, Mother used to take him out every day, to Colonial Lake, which was in the middle of downtown [Charleston]. She carried him in a special carriage I bought for him from Hartmann’s mail-order house. Few in the city had anything like my carriage. It was ivory-colored wickerwork, and it had a reversible top—as you walked, you could look at the baby. Mother got busy and crocheted an ivory blanket, which she laced through with blue ribbon around the sides and then caught with blue bows. Then she covered some pants guards (which men used in those days, when riding their bicycles) to pull the ends of the blanket through so it would drape nicely. I don’t think, by the time she got through, that anybody in town, black or white, had a fancier baby carriage. It entertained her to go along President Street and then up Calhoun to the lake, talking and laughing with Rob. The only drawback was that if she got tired, she couldn’t sit down. The benches by Colonial Lake were for white only. But anyway, Mother went almost every day. One day, a big, burly, Irish policeman came up to her to admire this rich baby and play with it too. He smiled, but when he looked in and saw it was a black baby in the carriage, that was the end of the smiling. “Where did you get that carriage?” “I didn’t get it. His mother got it. Ask her.” And she stood there, looking him right in the face, just daring him to touch anything, daring him , and mad enough to spit. When he found out it was a black baby she had been pushing every day, he tried to forbid her to come down. She just kept looking at him, right in his red face, until he got through talking. Then she carried on walking around Colonial Lake, round and round and round , as much as she was able. Mother said the Lord gave her strength that day, to keep on walking around that lake. The policeman couldn’t do anything, because many black women walked with white babies down there. It wasn’t forbidden for a black woman to take any color baby to Colonial Lake; she just couldn’t sit down.
“Why did that policeman grin at Rebecca Garvin every day? Not to express his goodwill toward her or his delight to find her out walking on a fine day. He grinned because the fine carriage and fittings led him to assume that she was the servant of his own betters, tending the child of his betters.”
When attempting to discover a real scientific entity, the entity itself cannot be part of ones analysis itself, for then one is presuming that it already exists, before one can ever prove it. The situation is circular.
“Needless to add, no one ventured to ask the most embarrassing question of all, the one that stumped the scientific racists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: how to assign the subjects of the experiments to one “race” or the other without assuming the very racial distinction the experiment is supposed to prove? Try as they would, the scientific racists of the past failed to discover any objective criterion upon which to classify people; to their chagrin, every criterion they tried varied more within so-called races than between them.”
Racism and slavery were about profit, not segregation
“Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco. One historian has gone so far as to call slavery “the ultimate segregator.” 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… 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. "
“They know that the English considered no brutality too extreme in bringing to heel the supposedly savage and undoubtedly fair-skinned Irish. Oliver Cromwell sold survivors of the Drogheda massacre as slaves in Barbados, and his agents systematically auctioned Irish children off to planters in the West Indies. Nazi concentration camps swallowed up not only Jews and Gypsies but also partisans, resistance fighters, and Communists, whom even the United States Supreme Court would be hard-pressed to define as racial groups. 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. Ultimately, the only check upon oppression is the strength and effectiveness of resistance to it.”
“Race as a coherent ideology did not spring into being simultaneously with slavery, but took even more time than slavery did to become systematic. A commonplace that few stop to examine holds that people are more readily oppressed when they are already perceived as inferior by nature. The reverse is more to the point. People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed. Africans and their descendants might be, to the eye of the English, heathen in religion, outlandish in nationality, and weird in appearance. But that did not add up to an ideology of racial inferiority until a further historical ingredient got stirred into the mixture: 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.”
Class, economy, capitalism
“The domination of plantation slavery over Southern society preserved the social space within which the white yeomanry —that is, the small farmers and artisans who accounted for about three-fourths of the white families in the slave South just before the Civil War—could enjoy economic independence and a large measure of local self-determination, insulated from the realm of capitalist market society. By doing so, slavery permitted and required the white majority to develop its own characteristic form of racial ideology… There is never ultimately enough force to go around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself. If the slaveholders had produced white supremacy without producing cotton, their class would have perished in short order.”
“Forced to ride Jim Crow is the key. Not identity as sense of self, but identification by others, peremptory and binding, figuring even in well-meant efforts to undo the crimes of racism. The victim’s intangible race, rather than the perpetrator’s tangible racism, becomes the center of attention. Thus, racist profiling goes by the misnomer “racial profiling,” and the usual remedy proposed for it is to collect information about—what else?—the victims’ “race.””
“Slavery was a system for the extortion of labor, not for the management of “race relations,” whether by segregation or by integration.”
“In my work on racecraft, I have been struck over and over again by such intellectual commonalities with witchcraft as circular reasoning, prevalence of confirming rituals, barriers to disconfirming factual evidence, self-fulfilling prophecies, multiple and inconsistent causal ideas, and colorfully inventive folk genetics. And to these must be added varieties of more or less legitimized collective action such as gossip, exclusion, scapegoating, and so on, up to and including various forms of coercion (which is to say that the logical and methodological byways of racecraft, like those of witchcraft, are rife with dangers to body as well as to mind). Taken together, such traits constitute a social world whose inhabitants experience (and act on) a marrow-deep certainty that racial differences are real and consequential, whether scientifically demonstrable or not. Obviousness is the hallmark of such a world. The evidence is everywhere, populating the banalities and the showstoppers of life. So the results of telling any inhabitant of such a world that races do not exist are like those I used to read from colonial district commissioners’ reports of informing villagers that witches do not exist. Those results amount to a What’s-up-with-you? incredulity.”
Invisible ontologies
“The important point, it seems to me, is not what that substance was or exactly where it might be found, but that Zande theory postulated one. Invisible ontologies require—and therefore acquire—anchors in sensible experience, including quasi-biological anchors. By their nature, they must be propped up and helped along, one way or another. An innovation that made carriers of the substance readily recognizable at fifty yards would shift the problem of invisibility, but not necessarily solve it.”
“But we may equally well observe that race beliefs, too, are acquired in the course of rearing and, furthermore, that the evidence that races exist is obvious. “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. Since race is ubiquitous, that list is open to indefinite extension. One could add to it everything from blood pressure to consumer preferences, athletic prowess, propensity to welfare dependence (or to allegedly unfair claims to jobs), likelihood to be transporting illegal drugs on the nation’s streets and roads (or, lately, through its airports), and much else. 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.”
“Du Bois waged battles to re-educate America’s collective consciousness, partly to prevent the apparent justification of outrages of all kinds, and partly because this consciousness served as a mirror whose reflections were one source of a tormented double-consciousness among black Americans. He sought to disrupt the social processes that invented “the Negro” as the object that he called a tertium quid: more than an animal, less than a human being.”
“Racism and class inequality in the United States have always been part of the same phenomenon. Afro-Americans began their history in slavery, a class status so abnormal by the time of the American Revolution that it required an extraordinary ideological rationale— which then and ever since has gone by the name race —to fit plausibly into supposedly republican institutions.”
“Once that definition became ingrained in social practice, improved class position might at any moment fall subject to a racist veto.”
“The initial designation of Afro-Americans as a race on the basis of their class position has colored all subsequent discussion of inequality, even among white persons. In racial disguise, inequality wears a surface camouflage that makes inequality in its most general form—the form that marks and distorts every aspect of our social and political life—hard to see, harder to discuss, and nearly impossible to tackle. The pattern began when slavery helped to mute class inequality by sheltering the white majority of the South from the cold winds of national and international markets.”
“The civil rights era inaugurated yet another dynamic of racecraft and inequality, by removing the legal basis for the exclusion of black Americans from both the body politic and the body social. When the long postwar economic expansion ended during the upheavals of the 1970s, white working people no longer enjoyed special white-only entitlements (such as GI loans and education); nor could space be cleared for them by explicit discrimination against Afro-Americans. Indeed, were every black job-seeker to be denied employment, there would still not be enough jobs for all white claimants, at a time when five people are vying for every job opening. (By the same token, as a wag once pointed out, if 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.) Today we live with a new version of the racecraft-inequality dynamic. With the economic deck now stacked against most working Americans and the white-only postwar bounty at an end, racecraft offers white Americans a plausible way to hold someone responsible, but not an effective way to seek redress.”
“What have we the right to claim as Americans? What are we free to imagine? A decent job, a solid education, health care, dignity in old age? Like all ideologies, the prevailing ideology of inequality presents both a prescription and a proscription, an action and an inhibition, the thinkable and the unthinkable. A case in point. The city and state of New York and the federal government together pay a registered family day-care provider to look after a woman’s children while she works at a low-paying, dead-end job as a waitress at an all-night diner. (Her husband has lost his job.) The day-care provider costs more than the waitress receives, or is ever likely to receive, in wages. The mother sometimes has to rouse her children in the middle of the night when she collects them from the day-care provider at the end of a late 10-hour shift. It would be hard for her to visit her children’s school, oversee their homework, or read to them. She may even have trouble managing appointments for the children’s (and her own) dental and medical care. The thinkable, within the terms of reference of the prevailing ideology of inequality, is that a low-paying, dead-end, menial job is better than offering the mother a cash welfare payment, no matter how unwholesome the outcome for the children’s or the mother’s well-being. The inhumanity of that judgment can be readily made to vanish in the smoke of racecraft.”
“The comeback of bio-racism at this juncture is an act of destructive re-imagination on which well-meaning persons are now wasting precious mental resources. It is not a random occurrence, either, but a return of ideas developed a century and more ago to discredit a wave of new immigrants, most of them white, in an atmosphere of social distress amid excess not unlike today’s. The resurgence of bio-racism recalls, too, the tangle that ensnared those charged with enforcing the ceremonial rules of the Jim Crow South.”