Essay/Review. Snip: Even as the idea that “race is a social construction” has reached the level of truism among academics, most continue to think, write, and act as if there are identifiable races—not just “blacks” and “whites,” but “Hispanics,” “Native Americans,” and “Asian Americans”—and as if those categories provide a solid basis for understanding history and society. As the authors write, “Race relations as an analysis of society takes for granted that race is a valid empirical datum and thereby shifts attention from the actions that constitute racism—enslavement, disenfranchisement, segregation, lynching, massacres, and pogroms—to the traits that constitute race.” As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “The black man is someone who must ride ‘Jim Crow’ in Georgia.” A classic essay by Barbara Fields, originally published in 1990, provides the historical foundation of the critique outlined in Racecraft. The premise of the essay, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” is that “when virtually the whole of society … commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather it is ideology.” Her definition of “ideology” is unapologetically Marxist and refreshingly orthodox; it is the day-to-day vocabulary of prevailing economic and social relationships. And the material foundation of racist ideology in the United States, Fields argues, was slavery. Slavery did not always exist in the British colonies of North America. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, indenture was the dominant mode of labor in colonial Virginia, and the vast majority of bonded laborers had been born in England. Only as indentures began to term out and the growing number of emancipated Englishmen began to demand political rights concomitant with those of their landed neighbors did wealthy Virginians begin to look for another source of labor. They found it in slaves from Africa. Those slaves were available, they were bonded for life, and they were excluded from the political rights increasingly being claimed by emancipated Virginians. Saying that this transition can be explained by racial difference, however, strikes Fields as analogous to saying that “the Civil War explains why Americans fought between 1861 and 1865.” The relevant difference between Englishmen and Africans was not racial, it was historical, rooted in histories of struggle that made it more difficult to manage and exploit “free-born Englishmen” than it did enslaved Africans. The contradiction between the enslavement of some and the equality attributed to all at the moment of the American Revolution subsequently spawned a set of explanations(or perhaps even rationalizations): “Those holding liberty to be inalienable, and holding Afro-Americans as slaves, were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth.” Every subsequent generation of Americans has “re-invented” and “re-ritualized” that ideology in everyday life. The connections between race-thinking and ritual are made plain in another classic essay, “Witchcraft and Racecraft: Invisible Ontology in Its Sensible Manifestations,” written by Karen Fields. Both witchcraft and racecraft, she argues, are patterns of thought that lead otherwise sensible people to uncritically believe in non-existent things. Each represents a commitment to an “invisible ontology”—a rational (which is not to say accurate) way of explaining how things came to be a certain way, an accounting of cause and consequence. In the case of witchcraft, for example, the surface features of repeated bad luck—hit by a truck, fell from a tree, hit by another truck—make sense when interpreted as serial manifestations of a single underlying curse. Likewise, the impoverished, excluded, stigmatized, and imprisoned are viewed as racially different. Witchcraft and racecraft—unlike witches and race—are things that actually exist. They help make sense of the invisible order that underlies the palpable experience of everyday life; they revivify belief through its incessant ritualization.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:35:26 +0000
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