Racecraft The Soul of Inequality in American Life

by Fields, Karen E.; Fields, Barbara J.

• ISBN13: 9781781683132
• ISBN10: 1781683131
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2014-03-04
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

Tackling the myth of a post-racial society

Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft “ought to be positioned,” as Bookforum put it, “at the center of any discussion of race in American life.”

Most people assume 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.

Author Biography

Barbara J. Fields is Professor of History at Columbia University, author of Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century and coauthor of Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War.

Karen E. Fields, an independent scholar, holds degrees from Harvard University, Brandeis University, and the Sorbonne. She is the author of many articles and three published books: Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa, about millennarianism; Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (with Mamie Garvin Fields), about life in the twentieth-century South; and a retranslation of Emile Durkheim's masterpiece, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. She has two works in progress: Bordeaux's Africa, about the view of slavery from a European port city, and Race Matters in the American Academy.