#karen e. 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.

[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“

[magica-pseudoacademica]

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic [among the Azande, by E. E. Evans-Pritchard] is a powerful book of interpretation, but it is not a work of recognition ... Beliefs and habits that are Zande-like, so to speak, thrived close to Evans-Pritchard's home - and still do, close to our own. He had Europe's secular, scientific rationality in mind, not the differently constituted, commonsense rationality of everyday life; but modern science did not, and could not, extinguish its longer-established and more prolific relative, which both energizes and bedevils science itself.

Karen E. Fields, “Witchcraft and Racecraft: Invisible Ontology in Its Sensible Manifestations” in Witchcraft Dialogues: Anthropological and Philosophical Exchanges (2001)

[weil-weil-lautre]

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

[soulbrotherv2]

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

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.

[BOOK LINK]

[soulbrotherv2]

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

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. [book link]