Barbara Jeanne FieldsRecensioni

quit reading after about 50 pages. seemed like a mixture of her personal reality and experiences (well-written and valuable) mixed up with pseudo-history and pseudo-scientific anthropology (not so valuable).

In The Myth of Sisyphus, if you'll excuse the digression, Albert Camus did not set out to prove that life was absurd. Rather, he assumed it, and set himself to the question of how one was to life if life was, in fact, absurd.

This analogy came immediately to my mind when reading Racecraft, which at the broadest level concerns the idea that "race" is an illusion, without any basis in biology, purely a matter of social convention. But authors Karen and Barbara Fields do not set out in this book to prove that race is an illusion. Rather, they assume it, and tackle a second-order problem: if race is an illusion, then why is race (and racism) such a big deal in American society?

To answer this question, they coin the titular neologism, "Racecraft," in direct analogy to "Witchcraft." By this, they are building off of the premodern understanding of a world in which unseen witches are the causal factors behind many seemingly ordinary things. For believers, the idea of witchcraft is an internally coherent ideology that can explain the world, even if it sometimes strains to cohere with external world. The same is true, the authors argue, for "racecraft," the belief that race is real and explains how humans act in the real world — belief in the reality and power of race is just as coherent an ideology, they write, as belief in the reality and power of witches.

The book itself is a collection of essays on a theme, composed over two decades for different mediums: book chapters, academic papers and oral presentations. As such it lacks the focus that a specifically composed book would have; rather than deliberately developing a thesis, the book moves in fits and starts, with the thesis advancing here and there, and other times repeating arguments and examples from earlier chapters. Still, the authors are intelligent and eloquent, and despite the handicap of their chosen medium remain engaging throughout.

This is perhaps not a book for someone completely new to a scholarly study of the topic of race; it often seems to be responding to unexplicated currents in academic discourse. But an intelligence layperson can still easily penetrate its arguments.

Interestingly, it offers no robust direction forward — if race if an illusion, the product of "racecraft," then what are people confronted with a society that takes race seriously to do? Despite the authors' frequent engagement with French scholars, they don't engage with the alternative French model in which race is explicitly ignored. In the conclusion, and bits and pieces throughout, the authors hint that a better solution might be to ignore race in favor of a focus on class as a more real social division, but this thesis is never developed at length.

If one is willing to accept (at least for the sake of argument) this book's premise, that "race" is a myth, this is a thought-provoking tome. It's not as persuasive a polemic as a book composed as a single text would be, but as a collection of intelligent essays it's still thought-provoking at a time when this type of thought is in particular demand.

Dangerous lies do not always dress the part.

The Fields sisters persuasively argue that race is not a coherent empirical fact, but a concept created via the strange ideological legerdemain they call "racecraft." While race is not real, the racist framework and practice of a double standard based on the ideology of race is very real. Racism is an active social practice that takes for granted that race exists, thereby creating the latter in an act of imagination and social belief—an act of racecraft. This thesis forms the backbone of a series of essays that touch on history, sociology, philosophy, genetics, and many other disciplines. The only thing that kept Racecraft from garnering five stars was that the book was somewhat front-loaded. The best essays were the first ones, making the sociological chapters on Durkheim, Du Bois, and witchcraft seem a letdown. This is not to say that they weren't interesting or compelling in their own right, only that they seemed underwhelming coming off the heals of the chapters on slavery, the legacy of Jim Crow, and C. Vann Woodward. In spite of this minor quibble, the book was certainly the most persuasive text on inequality and racism that I've read in years. Highly recommended.½

I really want to know the ideas in this book. I've heard great things. But the writing isn't just too accademic; it also really needs an edit. I tried to start in on a few different places, but I found myself reading the same paragraphs over and over trying to understand what the author was talking about. It's a shame.

Essays about race in America—race as racecraft, similar to witchcraft. Race itself doesn’t exist as a scientific fact, but racism does, much as witchcraft doesn’t work but in some places has a social reality that explains things to members of a society and that can lead people to kill. I liked the beginning parts on the metaphor of “blood” and the way that saying “Michael Brown was killed because he was black,” while a useful shorthand, can also locate the source of the problem in his “blackness,” as if that were a thing that existed outside society, whereas we do not as easily say “this kid was not killed for his misbehavior because he was white.” Later essays, including an imagined dialogue between DuBois and Durkheim—who were writing at the same time—were less interesting to me.½

A dense read -- denser than it needed to be. There's a part of me that thinks this isn't a problem because it isn't these particular authors' responsibility to educate everyone, but another, larger part of me worries that the important viewpoint contained in this book will be lost or ignored because it is written this way.

i have no idea how to rate this. the ideas, intention, and importance are 5 stars. but it's a really hard read, and that means that people who need to read it won't be able to get through it, and it could have been written to reach more people. also there are repetitive parts that i wish had been used to go more in depth. and lots that i could have used more explanation with. this is a collection of essays that don't always flow together, and that sometimes repeat the same stories. it's written in an extremely intellectual way and i hate to say how much of this was hard for me to understand or over my head without serious attention.

still, this book is so important. it takes the "race is a social construct" conclusion that people come to, and starts with that. it shows how racism is what created the idea of race in the first place (thank you thomas jefferson!). the authors show us how as americans we see race "naturally," but other people and other cultures don't, so there is actually nothing natural about it at all. they explain how creating this construct has benefited the privileged, and how hard it is to see it this way, even as they break it down for us.

"...America's post-racial era has not been born. Perhaps it can be made if America lets those concepts go. But if they are hard to let go, why is that? What are they made of? How do they work? And what work do they do? ... Racist concepts do considerable work in political and economic life; but, if they were merely an appendage of politics and economics, without intimate roots in other phases of life, their persuasiveness would accordingly diminish."

"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. ... 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."

"The wizardry of racecraft makes Jim Crow appear to have affected black Americans alone. ... Slavery enthroned inequality both among free citizens and between slaves and owners and, in the manner of its ending, left inequality as permanent bequest to America's future."

"Education could be a militant act in and of itself, on the part of both teacher and student."

"'Race' too often recommends itself as a guiltless word, a neutral term for an empirical fact. It is not. Race appears to be a neutral description of reality because of the race-racism evasion, through which immoral acts of discrimination disappear, and then reappear camouflaged as the victim's alleged difference."

"Euro-Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery."

"Scholars are quick to assimilate the commonplace that race is 'socially constructed' ... to the popular but mistaken view that race is equivalent to identity."

"Racial equality and racial justice are not figures of speech; they are public frauds, political acts with political consequences. Just as a half-truth is not a type of truth by a type of lie, so equality and justice, once modified by racial, become euphemisms for their opposites.

"If racecraft is unlike witchcraft, then lifting from us what Appiah calls its 'burdensome legacy' becomes easy lifting. All that is needed it propagation of the truth. Repetition of the scientific statement 'There are no races' will suffice. But if racecraft is like witchcraft, then repetition can do no more than transmute the scientific statement into the ritual drone of a mantra."

"It went without saying in the past that presidents were free to act in the interests of white Americans, and against the interests of black Americans, without paying a political price. The sword of racecraft thus dangles over Obama as it would not over a white president who favored white Americans, or who simply treated them fairly."