#barbara fields

[weil-weil-lautre]

Solidarity: A Path to a More Just and Inclusive Society - Advancing Together Symposium Panel

[zwischenstadt]

Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but for what we ourselves choose to do now.

Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of Americ

[billyfour]

[notinthehistorybooks]

I think what we need to remember, most of all, is that the Civil War is not over until we, today, have done our part in fighting it; as well as understanding what happened when the Civil War generation fought it. William Faulkner said once that, “History is not Was, it’s IS.” And what we need to remember about the Civil War is that the Civil War IS, in the present as well as in the past. The generation that fought the war, the generation that argued over the definition of the war, the generation that had to pay the price in blood, that had to pay the price in blasted hopes and a lost future, also established a standard that will not mean anything until we have finished the work. You can say “there’s no such thing as slavery anymore” or “we’re all citizens”, but if we’re all citizens then we all have a task to do to make sure that that, too, is not a joke. If some citizens live in houses and others live on the street, the Civil War is still going on. It’s still to be fought, and regrettably, it can still be lost.

Barbara J. Fields, from Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”

[weil-weil-lautre]

View Transcript A lengthy interview with historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields on their seminal essay collection Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Dan talks to the ...

A lengthy interview with historian Barbara Fields and sociologist Karen Fields on their seminal essay collection Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Dan talks to the sister scholars about the book; how Ta-Nehisi Coates’ primordialist view of white racism spells defeat; that racism serves the interest of capitalist class war, and endless debates over Rachel Dolezal distract us from that fact; and a whole ton more.

[weil-weil-lautre]

As George Santayana (almost) said, those who do not learn from history will have no idea what they are repeating.

Karen Fields and Barbara Fields, Racecraft, 63

[weil-weil-lautre]

A Labor Department sociologist I knew (a black woman) used to tell about the assignment she once got, to investigate the disproportionate wintertime use of Vaseline by black prison inmates, in comparison with their white peers. (Since no one was prepared to credit her with having an answer from down home sans research, she did the research and then told them: People used to use it for chapped skin.)

Barbara Fields, Racecraft, 212

[weil-weil-lautre]

Why the practice of racism itself produces and prolongs the illusion of race.

History professor Barbara and independent scholar Karen Fields discuss racism’s pervasive legacy in personal and political life. Barbara and Karen wrote the book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life.