#barbara j. fields

[zwischenstadt]

Meanwhile, many well-intentioned believers in truth and justice succumb to biological determinism, the armor of the enemy, when they see around them the ugly signs that racism continues to thrive in our world.  Weary of the struggle, they throw up their hands and declare that racism, if not genetically programmed, is nonetheless an idea so old and entrenched that it has “take on a life of its own.”  They thereby come much closer than they realize to the views of those they ostensibly oppose.  Although it is now frowned upon to attribute biological disability to those designated to be a race, it is eminently fashionable to attribute biological disability- or its functional equivalent- to those demonstrated to be racists.  Either way, Africans and their descendants become a special category set apart by biology: in the one instance their own, in the other that of their persecutors. But race is neither biology nor an idea absorbed into biology by Lamarckian inheritance. It is ideology, and ideologies do not have lives of their own. Nor can they be handed down or inherited: a doctrine can be, or a name, or a piece of property, but not an ideology. If race lives on today, it does not live on because we have inherited it from our forebears of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth or nineteenth, but because we continue to create it today… Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order.  They are also those academic writers whose invocation of self-propelling ‘attitudes’ and tragic flaws assigns Africans and their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history- a form of intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings, than that practiced by the bio- and theo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves of old, are expected to be grateful.  They are the academic ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ in whose version of race the neutral shibboleths difference and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, oppression, and exploitation, diverting attention from the anything-but-neutral history these words denote.  They are also the Supreme Court and spokesmen for affirmative action, unable to promote or even define justice expect by enhancing the authority and prestige of race; which they will continue to do forever so long as the most radical goal of the political opposition remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than their abolition.

Racecraft: The Soul in Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

[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.

[weil-weil-lautre]

In an interview with Christopher Lydon of Radio Open Source, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life co-author Barbara J. Fields explains why "there’s no race story in this [presidential] campaign. There’s a racism story and there’s an inequality story." (via Flickr) Christopher Lydon: Barbara Fields is an esteemed historian of the South, where she was born, and teaches at Columbia University in New York. She fights racism by denying race categorically. The problem that has taken this country to the precipice, she told us this week, is inequality. She says racism is the evil code of group privilege and invented differences. In this light, race is a non-science and ‘racecraft’ is a process of self-deception. Barbara J. Fields: There’s no race story in this [presidential] campaign. There’s a racism story and there’s an inequality story and the two are connected. Racism and inequality have the same central nervous system. They’re apart of the same process. People should not think, for example, Bernie Sanders isn’t addressing the problems of black people because he doesn’t have a black label on it, with a bow tied around it, saying this is for black people. But, when he speaks for a new minimum wage and for higher-education to be within everybody’s reach, these are the inequality problems that plague everyone. And they’re one of the reasons why racism, not race, is intense and resurgent in this country.

[weil-weil-lautre]

Whiteness and just ordinary white people with agency even if only agency in doing evil, and furthermore by equating race with identity and attributing it to white persons, whiteness seems to banish the asymmetry that is so troubling but that is also the essence of racism. The vagueness of the concept and its ability to cross back and forth across the border between individual and collective, between subjective and objective and between optional and compulsory have tempted scholars to collapse racism, which is a forcible and authoritative assignment of race from outside, into racial identity. Once racism - having passed through what I call a buffer zone of whiteness - crosses the border into identity and volunteerism it returns to a starting point with an alias. Which is race and a new passport. The blurred photograph seems to show a neutral face and the impostor goes surrounded by the benevolent trappings of agency. What is actually a brand becomes an identity and those who wear the brand become agents of its burning into their own flesh. This is a quotation from a recently well-regarded historical scholar. `Race as an embodied category of difference and a constructed aspect of identity is not imposed by one group upon another. It is a product of an ongoing dialogue. Racial identifications function as tools above domination and resistance.' This is what I call gelding and taming the rogue elephant. So that once the domestication is complete, those to whom race has been attached as a stigma instead appear as its willing coauthors and the coauthorship has been popularized as an act of resistance.

Barbara J. Fields

[weil-weil-lautre]

[coquelicoq]

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.

Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, chapter titled “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America“

[coquelicoq]

Facts of nature spawned by the needs of ideology sometimes acquire greater power over people's minds than facts of nature spawned by nature itself. Some noblemen in tsarist Russia sincerely believed that, while their bones were white, the serfs' bones were black; and, given the violence that prevailed in those times, I must presume that noblemen had ample occasion to observe the serfs' bones at first hand. Such is the weight of things that must be true ideologically that no amount of experimental observation can disprove them. But because tsarist Russia had no conception of absolute equality resting on natural law, it did not need as consistent or radical a version of absolute inequality resting on natural law as developed in the United States in the wake of the Revolution. When self-evident laws of nature guarantee freedom, only equally self-evident laws of equally self-evident nature can account for its denial.

Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, chapter titled “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America“

[weil-weil-lautre]

In Conversation: Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields, and Adolph Reed