Racecraft

The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Barbara J. Fields, Karen E. Fields

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781781684382
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Chapter 1
A Tour of Racecraft

The ideas of racecraft are pieced together in the ordinary course of everyday doing. Along the way, they intertwine with ideas that shape other aspects of American social life. Those of racecraft govern what goes with what and whom (sumptuary codes), how different people must deal with each other (rituals of deference and dominance), where human kinship begins and ends (blood), and how Americans look at themselves and each other (the gaze). These ideas do not exist purely in the mind, or in only one mind. They are social facts—like six o’clock, both an idea and a reality.¹ Because racecraft exists in this way, its constant remaking constantly retreats from view. This “now you see it, now you don’t” quality is what makes racism—the practice of a double standard based on ancestry—possible.

To eliminate racecraft from the fabric of our lives, we must first unravel the threads from which it is woven. Thus, the current guided tour. Its three sections—“From Racism to Race,” “Blood Works,” and “How Americans Look”—are not linear. The sections circuit and overlap, like the social facts of everyday life that they chronicle.

From Racism to Race

Begin with a story about travel in Mississippi circa 1964, a time and place when racecraft daily performed its conjuror’s trick of transforming racism into race, leaving black persons in view while removing white persons from the stage. To spectators deceived by the trick, segregation seemed to be a property of black people, not something white people imposed on them. But Robert S. McNamara, in his memoir of service during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, recounts an incident that set all parties on the stage.² While addressing business and labor leaders whom he had summoned to the White House to demand their help in passing the Civil Rights Bill, Johnson told his story of the day he and Lady Bird lived Jim Crow. Johnson was speeding along a road in Mississippi with his wife and their black longtime cook, Zephyr, when Lady Bird turned to him and said, “Would you please stop at the next gas station [restroom]?” They stopped. Not long thereafter, Zephyr said, “Mr. President, would you mind stopping by the side of the road?” The President replied with his well-known earthiness, “Why the hell didn’t you do it when Bird and I did?” Zephyr answered, “Cause they wouldn’t let me.” (Notice Zephyr’s “they”).

At that point in the story, “LBJ pounded on the table and in a bitter voice said, ‘Gentlemen, is that the kind of country you want? It’s not the kind I want.’” For a brief moment, Johnson had lived Jim Crow as Zephyr did. Ordinarily, white Southerners experienced Jim Crow as law and order, not as the ever-present disorder it was for black Southerners. So white Southerners did not notice, or need to notice, their own presence on the Jim Crow stage. McNamara’s anecdote recaptures a moment when Jim Crow inconvenienced the President of the United States.

The disorder engendered by racecraft did not end with Jim Crow. What better typifies it than being killed by mistake, as happened not long ago to an Afro-American police officer? While pursuing a car thief, the officer was shot to death by a white brother officer, who took him for a criminal.³ The instant, inevitable—but, upon examination, bizarre—diagnosis of many people is that black officers in such situations have been “killed because of their skin color.” But has their skin color killed them? If so, why does the skin color of white officers not kill them in the same way? Why do black officers not mistake white officers for criminals and blaze away, even when the white officers are dressed to look like street toughs? Everyone has skin color, but not everyone’s skin color counts as race, let alone as evidence of criminal conduct. The missing step between someone’s physical appearance and an invidious outcome is the practice of a double standard: in a word, racism. It was his fellow officer, not his skin color, that caused the black officer’s death. Even so, the fellow officer was devastated by his error and its fatal consequence. His grief and that of other white officers visibly weighed down the sad procession in blue that conducted the dead policeman toward his final rest. Racism did not require a racist. It required only that, in the split second before firing the fatal shot, the white officer entered the twilight zone of America’s racecraft.

“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. The quantitative meaning slips again in the paradoxical formula “majority minority,” referring to the projected numerical predominance of non-white persons in the United States in the not-so-distant future. If the logic were harmless, it would be hilarious.

But “minority” is not harmless. Zigzagging between quantitative and invidious meanings, it justified a dragnet in September 1992 in which officers rounded up all the black and Hispanic men and some women in Oneonta, New York. Police deployed the dragnet after an elderly white woman, victim of an attempted armed robbery, described her assailant as a black male, possibly young and with an injured wrist. Is it imaginable that police would round up, detain, question, and search every white person in a town because an elderly victim of attempted armed robbery described her assailant as a white male, possibly young and possibly with an injured wrist? Would they, furthermore, obtain lists of all white students on the local campus of the State University of New York, question them, and check their arms for signs of injury; detain white men found arriving in or leaving the town by bus; pull over cars carrying white persons; and even stop a white female admissions officer en route to visit her ailing grandmother? When a group of students posed that hypothetical question to a police official, he answered that it would not have been “practical.”⁴ Practical hid the qualitative and invidious meaning of “minority” inside the quantitative one. It would not have been practical to arrest and search every white man in town over a vague suspicion attaching to one; neither would it have passed muster as legitimate police work.

Next on the tour, consider a habit so fundamental that, without it, there can be no racecraft: the will to classification. Writing in the New York Times, a social work consultant describes his intervention to stop a young woman from slapping her young child on the subway.⁵ Ordering her to stop, he threatens to call the police. Of about thirty persons in the car, only a woman in her fifties seated near the young woman takes a hand, quietly suggesting ways to handle the child without slapping. A stranger from Mars (if suitably briefed about New York subways) might have considered intervention by two out of about thirty people a high percentage, whoever the interveners were. Observing through the smoke of racecraft, however, the New Yorker immediately shuffles the protagonists into categories: He, “a 54-year-old white Jewish guy”; the child-slapper, “a young African-American kid with a kid”; the quiet counselor, “an African-American woman in her fifties”; and two white men who congratulated him for intervening, after the fact and at a safe distance. His first impression, that the silent onlookers from whom he “wished [he] had received more support” were “mainly black,” gave way upon later reflection to the realization that, actually, “there were many more whites.”

Recounting the story to a friend, the consultant again classifies. His friend, a “30-something Arab-Canadian,” says, “I don’t get the white and black in this. Why would you want the black people to jump in and give you support? Are the black people her people and the white people yours?” The consultant regards his friend’s response as “a post-racial analysis.” Not so fast. The “Arab-Canadian” is the nearest equivalent to a stranger from Mars: a person raised outside the force field of American racism, whose view therefore is not distorted by the haze of expectations (in other words, racecraft) through which the American-bred consultant filters what he sees. The Canadian is the outsider who attributes a drought, a crop failure, or an illness to ordinary cause and effect; the American is the insider on the alert for witchcraft.

That imprint of American rearing is not limited to white Americans, nor does travel abroad automatically disable its mental apparatus. Thus: A black American woman professor, recently arrived in France, staggers into a sixteenth-century church to escape the hot sun of Bordeaux in August. Looking straight ahead from the entrance, her vision zooms toward an image at the very center of the stained-glass window behind the altar: a black slave, kneeling and in chains. She asks Bordeaux residents the why and wherefore of it. They are astonished to learn that such an image exists in that well-known old church. Some openly doubt the report: “Where?!” And: “What makes you think it is a slave?” One Saturday afternoon, the parish priest arrives to prepare for a wedding, just as the American visitor from Mars is leading a tour for University of Bordeaux students. The priest is as amazed as the students.⁶ By rights, the window had other claimants to attention. A Crusader in his red-cross tunic stood prominently on the slave’s right; above him, a huge Mary rose toward heaven; yet the eyes of the American went straight to the man in chains.

Black people everywhere do not “see” alike. Persons from Africa and the Caribbean may not see what Afro-Americans see. Visualize the Afro-American professor again, this time in Washington, DC, en route to Union Station, on a rainy fall afternoon in 2008, flagging down a taxi. She is safely on board when the African driver spots a soaked white traveler, loaded with baggage. He glances at her through the rearview mirror to ask if it will be all right to pick up the other traveler as well. Why, of course! He pulls to the curb and proposes. The traveler jumps, his face the very portrait of fear. “No, thank you. No, no. Thank you.” Getting under way again, the driver again glances in the mirror. “What was wrong with him?” At the professor’s explanation, “He saw a car full of black people,” the driver exclaims, his face registering shocked understanding. Asked later where he is from, he says, “I am Egyptian.” In not instantly seeing the reality that both the white and the black American did, the African cab driver qualifies as a Martian, too.

So do children before they have absorbed the classification system. In late June of 2009, sixty-five children aged six to twelve, most of them Afro-American or Hispanic, bounced out of their bus and ran toward the pool of the Valley Club, in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia.⁷ Their day camp, Creative Steps, had a contract with the club for swimming one afternoon each week. At first sight of the children, the club members at the pool rose and flew like startled birds.⁸ “Made for the exits” and “pulled their children out of the pool” were phrases that appeared in reports of the ensuing uproar. What exactly did “pulling their children out” look like? How must a child have felt to be pulled out or to see others pulled out? What about the three white children whose parents let them stay? Most of all, how is it that grown-ups decided, all at once, to run from children?

On the following day, the club banned all the summer camps that had contracted to use the pool, which prompted the Justice Department to file suit. Members began explaining their actions to themselves and to the press.⁹ Accor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Authors’ Note
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - A Tour of Racecraft
• Chapter 2 - Individual Stories and America’s Collective Past
• Chapter 3 - Of Rogues and Geldings
• Chapter 4 - Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America
• Chapter 5 - Origins of the New South and the Negro Question
• Chapter 6 - What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly
• Chapter 7 - Witchcraft and Racecraft: Invisible Ontology in Its Sensible Manifestations
• Chapter 8 - Individuality and the Intellectuals: An Imaginary Conversation Between Emile Durkheim and W. E. B. Du Bois
• Conclusion: Racecraft and Inequality
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright