# Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Author: *Karen E. Fields & Barbara J. Fields* Published Year: 2014 Read: 2021 Tags: #politics #racism # Highlights ## Introduction ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - Ancestry is usually a more useful, and scientifically accurate term for family history than race - Race is invented while racism remains real - Acts of racism use the trick of race, to make the victim have some invented skin quality that created the racist act ### Interesting Highlights - Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race, as just defined, so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss. Consider the statement "black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color"—a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke—paff—reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole. In similar fashion, enslavers disappear only to reappear, disguised, in stories that append physical traits defined as slave-like to those enslaved. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609112) ^rw283609112 - The nineteenth-century bio-racists' ultimately vain search for traits with which to demarcate human groups regularly exhibited such maneuvering. Race is the principal unit and core concept of racism. Racism refers to the theory and the practice of applying a social, civic, or legal double standard based on ancestry, and to the ideology surrounding such a double standard. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609111) ^rw283609111 - - - ## Chapter 1: A Tour of Racecraft ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - everyone has skin colour (and ancestry of course) but race does not apply to everyone - racism is the practice of a double standard, something that applies to those deemed to have race, and acts done to them but could not apply to 'white' people - behind the routines and unwritten rules that enforce racism contain the violence that will be exposed if the rules become written and the routine turns non-routine. - The concept of race/ethnicity as defined by the people who use it make facts out of a shaky concept leaves people out, shoves a lot of people into *other*. My own uncertainity when confronted with UK forms which say White British or Other. But the also English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish *OR* Irish is always confusing. I may be white, but what of the Celtic refusal to be British, where do I put that, its part the ethnicity. But i'm not just Irish. ### Interesting Highlights #### From Racism to Race - Mississippi circa 1964, a time and place when racecraft daily performed its conjuror's trick of transforming racism into race, leaving black persons in view while removing white persons from the stage. To spectators deceived by the trick, segregation seemed to be a property of black people, not something white people imposed on them. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609113) ^rw283609113 - While pursuing a car thief, the officer was shot to death by a white brother officer, who took him for a criminal.2 The instant, inevitable—but, upon examination, bizarre—diagnosis of many people is that black officers in such situations have been "killed because of their skin color." But has their skin color killed them? If so, why does the skin color of white officers not kill them in the same way? Why do black officers not mistake white officers for criminals and blaze away, even when the white officers are dressed to look like street toughs? [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609114) ^rw283609114 - 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. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609115) ^rw283609115 - "Minority" ranks alongside "the color of their skin" as a verbal prop for the mental trick that turns racism into race. The word slips its literal meaning as well as its core definition, which is quantitative. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609116) ^rw283609116 - Sumptuary codes enforce social classification. They consist of rules, written or unwritten, that establish unequal rank and make it immediately visible. When there is no phenotypic difference, like the little girl's "too dark" skin, sumptuary rules do what nature leaves undone. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609117) ^rw283609117 - for many years thereafter), a black person was required to step off the sidewalk when a white person approached and, if male, to uncover his head. Obedience usually concealed the intrinsic violence of the rule and kept black people visibly in their place. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609118) ^rw283609118 - everyday routines that organize racism do not always, but always can, explode. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609119) ^rw283609119 - Sumptuary rules produce a regular supply of circumstantial evidence about what the world is made of and who belongs where within it. Not only can rules endowed with that power shape action in advance, they can also shape opinions of which the holders may be unaware until the moment they come into play. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609120) ^rw283609120 - Years later, an exotic predicament of ethnicity arose in the classroom. A young woman raised her hand, but fumbled for words when recognized: "Some of us want … I mean, we think we need," then said, "I wish I had a race," and fell silent. After a wait, the black woman professor prompted, "What do you mean?" The student explained that her family had immigrated to the United States from Iran, then stopped again. Perhaps the rest seemed obvious to her. It was not obvious to the rest of the class or to the professor. When asked why she "wants" a race, she mumbled something about the census form. "To have to write 'Other' isn't, well, it isn't very nice." Understanding then lit faces all around the room. For that young woman, not to "have" a race is to be less than fully American. What can she do but take America's imprisoning social forms as she finds them [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609121) ^rw283609121 #### Blood Works - And in identifying the offspring of mixed parents as a "multiracial population"—that is, literally sui generis, different from both parents—she has rediscovered a core fiction of folk-racism, unnatural neo-humans. It must bemuse any Martian who may be monitoring Earth from a distant outpost to find intelligent life studying nature, learning something about it, and then blithely discarding the results. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609122) ^rw283609122 - - - ## Chapter 2: Individual Stories and America's Collective Past ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts History has a tendency to ascribe the actions and built up pressure of all of society to the ruling class. As if the ruler who signed the order or gave into the pressure was the cause of the change. [[The Great Man Theory of History|Presidentitus]] The invention of race to provide the white working population with a sense that they were above another underclass, shattering class solidarity and removing the shared concerns that all workers had. ### Interesting Highlights - President-itis (the disease that leads otherwise sane people to argue that Eisenhower launched the Civil Rights Movement, Lincoln freed the slaves, Roosevelt cured the depression, and Nixon ended the war in Vietnam) is a common example, but not the only one, of a big picture that proves false because its individual components have gotten lost. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609123) ^rw283609123 - A vast reservoir of bitterness and violence might overflow at any moment against the Afro-American whose words or actions, or whose simple being, reminded a white person of his subservience to another white person. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609124) ^rw283609124 #### Rebecca Garvin Conclusion - Why did that policeman grin at Rebecca Garvin every day? Not to express his goodwill toward her or his delight to find her out walking on a fine day. He grinned because the fine carriage and fittings led him to assume that she was the servant of his own betters, tending the child of his betters. Correspondingly, his anger when he discovered his mistake grew from the realization that he had mistakenly offered courtesy to a black woman, thinking he was offering it to her white employer. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609125) ^rw283609125 - - - ## Chapter 3: Of Rogues and Geldings ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - [[Race-Racism Evasion]] - [[Social Constructs]] ### Interesting Highlights - 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. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609126) ^rw283609126 - It brings to mind an anecdote about an Irishman who, when asked the way to Ballynahinch, responds: "If I were you, I wouldn't start from here at all." [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609127) ^rw283609127 - Starting from "ethnoracial mixture" leads to the great evasion of American historical literature, as of American history itself: the substitution of "race" for "racism." That substitution, as I have written elsewhere, "transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object." Disguised as race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather than something racists do [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609128) ^rw283609128 - Thomas Jefferson pioneered the race-instead-of-racism ideological maneuver, and his Notes on the State of Virginia is its locus classicus. Judging slavery essential to the project of extending the sovereignty of the United States over the American continent, he tried to resolve the contradiction between enslavement and the natural right to freedom by interpreting slavery as a fact of the slaves' inferior nature. To that end, he formulated the notion of race, draping its ideological nakedness in a tissue of purported scientific argument so thin that he would surely have seen through it on any subject less central to his nation-founding project than slavery [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609129) ^rw283609129 - The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies. Scholars who intone "social construction" as a spell for the purification of race do not make clear—perhaps because they do not themselves realize—that race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609130) ^rw283609130 - Confronted with the intellectual arguments against the concept of race, my undergraduates react by grasping for another word to occupy the same conceptual space. "I don't feel comfortable saying 'race' after your class. But I don't know what else to call it," is a characteristic response. At the suggestion, "Why not 'ancestry,' if that's what you're talking about?" they retreat into inarticulate dissatisfaction. Instinctively, they understand that, while everyone has ancestry, only African ancestry carries the ultimate stigma. Therefore, what they are unknowingly searching for is a neutral-sounding word with racism hidden inside, which is what "race" is. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609131) ^rw283609131 - Two scholars, one of them a member of the Civil Rights Commission at the time, defended the disfranchisement of law-abiding Afro-Floridians during the presidential election of 2000 against the charge of racism. They did so on the grounds that a higher proportion of Afro-Floridians than Euro-Floridians have felony convictions and are therefore not entitled to vote. No matter that law-abiding Afro-Floridians have exactly the same rate of felony convictions (zero) as law-abiding Euro-Floridians, and that punishing one person for another's conduct negates the basic premises of a law-governed democratic society. Under cover of the evasion that attributes race to the disfranchised rather than racism to the disfranchiser, the authors have smuggled in a charter for collective punishment.21 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609132) ^rw283609132 - As a political precept, tolerance has unimpeachably anti-democratic credentials, dividing society into persons entitled to claim respect as a right and persons obliged to beg tolerance as a favor. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609133) ^rw283609133 - Tags: [[favorite]] - A teacher identifies for the children's benefit characteristics (ancestry, appearance, sexual orientation, and the like) that count as disqualifications from full and equal membership in human society. These, the children learn, they may overlook, in an act of generous condescension—or refuse to overlook, in an act of ungenerous condescension. Tolerance thus bases equal rights on benevolent patronization rather than democratic first principles, much as a parent's misguided plea that Jason "share" the swing or seesaw on a public playground teaches Jason that his gracious consent, rather than another child's equal claim, determines the other child's access. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609134) ^rw283609134 - Tags: [[racism]] - The Jews' very compliance with their persecutors' demand for conversion kindled greater anger against them, their enemies interpreting centuries of Christian practice as deep cover for a crypto-Jewish menace boring from within. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609135) ^rw283609135 - Whether called assimilation or amalgamation, the goal of blending in the discordant element operates on the rationale rather than on the problem. Framing questions in those terms guarantees that the answers will remain entangled in racist ideology. For example, a pair of sociologists investigating the degree of Afro-Caribbean immigrants' assimilation into American society unquestioningly adopt as their measure of assimilation the rate of intermarriage between Afro-Caribbeans and native white Americans, rather than the much higher rate of intermarriage between Afro-Caribbeans and native Afro-Americans.26 The American ancestry of most native Afro-Americans goes back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, whereas native white Americans are apt to be only first or second-generation Americans. Racism thus enters unannounced and unnoticed, to define eleventh or twelfth-generation black natives as less American than the children and grandchildren of white immigrants. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609136) ^rw283609136 - Persons of mixed background like Jean Toomer, Anatole Broyard, and Tiger Woods, along with their well-meaning but misguided champions, have reached the understanding that the categories imposed by racism are too restrictive to fit persons of ambiguous ancestry. They have not reached the deeper understanding that these categories are too restrictive to fit anyone. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609137) ^rw283609137 - - - ## Chapter 4: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts There is historical documentary evidence of [[The invention of racism]] in local laws which were spoke about in terms of ancestry, not about race. The contemporaneous literature shows the slaveholding rulers caught in the act of justifying why the enslaved were denied their freedom. The 'race' part of the equation of Slavery came into being much later, due to historical forces and the growing ideology of slavery as it moved from indentured europeans who had an cultural expectation of freedom and rights one day to Africans who had no history within these societies and therefore no expectation of ever receiving freedom of dignity. This was akin to an economic accident, where the cost of bodies, their transport and the last European indentured servants passing on lead to stolen africans being the dominant enslaved people. The supposedly egalitarian new US ideology had to make the enslaved something 'other' to justify why a huge part of their population could not enjoy the rights of man. The [[Race-Racism Evasion]] was induced to make the enslaved Africans embody something intrinsically inferior rather than their lack of freedom being the beginning and end of the cause of their supposed inferiority. [[Ideology]] is a framework for how we make sense of the world, it is based on our real world experience. Ideology is a [[Social Constructs|social construct]] but also *real*. The Field's mention how Ideology cannot be just passed to someone, it has to be in tune with how they experience the world. We all live under a dominant ideologies, Liberalism and Global Capitalism, but our experience of these ideologies is filters through our own experience of them. Our personal ideology. This is one reason that 'reason' and evidence alone cannot simply disprove falsities within a society or individual level ideology. They are affirmed by the experience we have with them. Race may be scientifically incorrect, a construct, but it is an idealogical lens that we reproduce and truly experience all the time. This reproduction of race through our personal and societal ideologies is how Racism continues, we will not let it die because it is part of the texture and fabric of our experience. There are plenty of [[Social Constructs]] that came about the same time as Race that we no longer reproduce, there is no genetic or hereditary method by which we must keep racist ideology, but our social structure demands that we reproduce it, so it lives with us. The ritual repetition of the appropriate social behavior makes for the continuity of ideology, not the "handing down" of the appropriate "attitudes." [[Change occurs on faultlines between ideas]], the continuous day to day, micro-level struggle and resistance of the European working classes as emerging capitalism brought them to be workers instead of peasants means that even Indentured Servants had expectations of rights, as small as these expectations were they were accepted by society because the outcomes of the [[Dialectic]] between resistance and force settled at a level that enslaved Africans did not have, as they emerged into early capitalism without a social history in the eyes of the dominant ideology. The unwritten violence behind slavery and the other ideology kept an appearance of peace as experienced by most of the white society. Force alone is not enough to make power, as history shows, the most violent form of organisation does not equate to the most dominant. Rather force and violence is part of the equation of building power alongside *shaping the terrain*, repetitively creating the norm, reproducing it, until via the balance of competing ideas, the terrain becomes the ideology. American conservatism is different to European conservatism because it never assumed the lower classes to be divinely 'lower', it needed a coalition between ruling class and workers based on race and the assumption that only 'white' people were seen as valid participants in the democratic process. ### Interesting Highlights - Only if race is defined as innate and natural prejudice of color does its invocation as a historical explanation do more than repeat the question by way of answer. And there an insurmountable problem arises: since race is not genetically programmed, racial prejudice cannot be genetically programmed either but, like race itself, must arise historically [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609139) ^rw283609139 #### The History of an Ideology - Race is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light or the value of π) that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology. It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609140) ^rw283609140 - Scholars occasionally maintain that English indentured servants escaped that fate while Africans fell victim to it because Europeans would go only so far and no farther in oppressing people of their own color. But they really only believe such folklore when they are floating in the twilight world of racial ideology, a world in which even the Supreme Court of the United States finds itself mentally disarmed. Once restored to honest daylight, they know better. They know that the Greeks and Romans enslaved people of their own color. They know that Europeans held other Europeans in both slavery and serfdom, and that the law in Tudor England provided for the enslavement of vagabonds. They know that the English considered no brutality too extreme in bringing to heel the supposedly savage and undoubtedly fair-skinned Irish. Oliver Cromwell sold survivors of the Drogheda massacre as slaves in Barbados, and his agents systematically auctioned Irish children off to planters in the West Indies. Nazi concentration camps swallowed up not only Jews and Gypsies but also partisans, resistance fighters, and Communists, whom even the United States Supreme Court would be hard-pressed to define as racial groups. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609141) ^rw283609141 - Resistance does not refer only to the fight that individuals, or collections of them, put up at any given time against those trying to impose on them. It refers also to the historical outcome of the struggle that has gone before, perhaps long enough before to have been hallowed by custom or formalized in law—as "the rights of an Englishman," for example. The freedoms of lower-class Englishmen, and the somewhat lesser freedoms of lower-class Englishwomen, were not gifts of the English nobility, tendered out of solicitude for people of their own color or nationality. Rather, they emerged from centuries of day-to-day contest, overt and covert, armed and unarmed, peaceable and forcible, over where the limits lay. Moral scruples about what could and what could not be done to the lower classes were nothing but the shoulds and should nots distilled from this collective historical experience, ritualized as rules of behavior or systematized as common law—but always liable to be put once again on the table for negotiation or into the ring for combat. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609142) ^rw283609142 #### Custom and Law - Africans and Afro-West Indians had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors. Therefore, the custom and law that embodied that history did not apply to them. To put it another way: when English servants entered the ring in Virginia, they did not enter alone. Instead, they entered in company with the generations who had preceded them in the struggle; and the outcome of those earlier struggles established the terms and conditions of the latest one. But Africans and Afro-West Indians did enter the ring alone. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609143) ^rw283609143 - Africans and Afro-West Indians were thus available for perpetual slavery in a way that English servants were not. Indeed, Virginians could purchase them ready-enslaved and pre-seasoned; and so they did in the earliest years of the traffic. Only much later did this become a matter of what we now call race. It took time, indeed, to become systematized as slavery. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609144) ^rw283609144 - Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice as much as an English servant for a five-year term, and stood a better-than-even chance of dying before five years could elapse. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609145) ^rw283609145 - Not until the 1660s did that morbid arithmetic change, and by then other things had changed as well. The price of tobacco had fallen, and so had the numbers of English servants emigrating to America. Afro-Americans began living long enough to be worth enslaving for life, and Euro-Americans began living long enough to claim both the freedom and the freedom dues—including land—to which they were entitled at the end of their terms of servitude. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609146) ^rw283609146 - It was a fortunate circumstance—fortunate for some, anyway—that made Africans and Afro-West Indians available for plantation labor at the historical moment when it became practical to buy slaves for life, and at the same time difficult and dangerous to continue using Europeans as the main source of plantation labor. The importation of African slaves in larger and larger numbers made it possible to maintain a sufficient corps of plantation laborers without building up an explosive charge of armed Englishmen resentful at being denied the rights of Englishmen and disposing of the material and political resources to make their resentment felt. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609147) ^rw283609147 #### From Oppression to Inferiority - All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements. Or, to put it another way, part of what human beings understand by the word "nature" is the sense of inevitability that gradually becomes attached to a predictable, repetitive social routine: "custom, so immemorial that it looks like nature," as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote. The feudal nobility of the early Middle Ages consisted of people more powerful than their fellows through possession of arms or property or both. No one at that time, not even they themselves, considered them superior by blood or birth; indeed, that would have been heresy. But the nobleman's habit of commanding others, ingrained in day-to-day routine and thus bequeathed to heirs and descendants, eventually bred a conviction that the nobility was superior by nature, and ruled by right over innately inferior beings. By the end of the fifteenth century, what would have been heresy to an earlier age had become practically an article of faith [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609148) ^rw283609148 - Historians can actually observe colonial Americans in the act of preparing the ground for race without foreknowledge of what would later rise on the foundation they were laying. A law enacted in the colony of Maryland in 1664 established the legal status of slave for life and experimented with assigning slave condition after the condition of the father. That experiment was soon dropped. Paternity is always ambiguous, whereas maternity is not. Slaveholders eventually recognized the advantage of a different and unambiguous rule of descent, one that would guarantee to owners all offspring of slave women, however fathered, at the slight disadvantage of losing to them such offspring as might have been fathered on free women by slave men. Nevertheless, the purpose of the Maryland experiment is clear: to prevent the erosion of slaveowners' property rights that would result if the offspring of free white women impregnated by slave men were entitled to freedom. The language of the preamble to the law makes clear that the point was not yet race: "And forasmuch as divers freeborne English women forgettfull of their free Condicon and to the disgrace of our Nation doe intermarry with Negro slaues by which alsoe diuers suites[…] [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609138) ^rw283609138 #### The White Yeomanry - Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609149) ^rw283609149 - Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609150) ^rw283609150 - Ideology is not the same as propaganda. Someone who said, "Anti-slavery ideology infiltrated the slave quarters through illicit abolitionist newspapers," would be talking rather about propaganda than about ideology. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology could not be smuggled to them in alien newsprint. People deduce and verify their ideology in daily life. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology had to arise from their lives in slavery and from their daily relations with slaveholders and other members of slave society #### Ideology, Propaganda, and Dogma - the object was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white supremacy [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609151) ^rw283609151 - The foregoing line of argument raises the question of how one group's understanding of reality, its ideology, appears to prevail over others when it comes to real and effective political power. Depending on who poses the question, it is the problem of social order, of converting power into authority, or of political hegemony. The most obvious answer—force—is not an answer. There is never ultimately enough force to go around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself. If the slaveholders had produced white supremacy without producing cotton, their class would have perished in short order. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609152) ^rw283609152 - Slaveholders, colonial rulers, prison guards, and the Shah's police have all had occasion to discover that when nothing remains except force, nothing remains—period. The rule of any group, the power of any state, rests on force in the final analysis. Anyone who gives the least thought to the matter reaches that conclusion, and thinkers as different in other respects as Weber, Marx, Machiavelli, and Madison would have no trouble agreeing on that. Rule always rests on force in the last analysis. But a ruling group or a state that must rely on force in the first analysis as well is one living in a state of siege, rebellion, war or revolution. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609153) ^rw283609153 - And yet, power does somehow become authority. A red light, or the upraised palm of a traffic policeman, brings people to a stop (at least in places where people tend to obey them) not by the exercise of power—neither a light nor a hand can stop a moving automobile—but by the exercise of authority. Why? Not, surely, because everyone shares a belief, an "attitude," about the sanctity of the law, or holds the same conception of a citizen's duty. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609154) ^rw283609154 - It is not an abstract belief or attitude that brings people to stop at a red light. Rather, people discover the advantage of being able to take for granted what everyone else will do at a busy intersection. Or, to be more exact, they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes that discovery—by making people stop again and again for red lights—without each person having to make the discovery anew by ad hoc calculation at every intersection. Both parts are necessary: the demonstrable advantage of stopping and the constant re-enactment of the appropriate conduct, a re-enactment that removes the matter from the realm of calculation to that of routine. The ritual repetition of the appropriate social behavior makes for the continuity of ideology, not the "handing down" of the appropriate "attitudes. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609155) ^rw283609155 #### Shaping the Terrain - Exercising rule means being able to shape the terrain. Suppose that the ruling group wants everyone in our landscape to move east, and therefore starts fires in the forests to the west. Mission accomplished: everybody moves east. Because they all share a conviction, an "attitude," glorifying the virtues of easterly movement? Not necessarily. All that order, authority, or hegemony requires is that the interest of the mass in not getting burned alive should intersect the interest of the rulers in moving everyone to the east. If easterly movement subsequently becomes part of the routine by which the masses organize their lives independently of the rulers, so that such movement becomes part of a constantly repeated social routine, a vocabulary will soon enough explain to the masses—not analytically, but descriptively—what easterly movement means. And that vocabulary need not and cannot be a duplicate of the one spoken by the rulers. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609156) ^rw283609156 - It was not Afro-Americans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves as a race. 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. From the era of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions on, they claimed liberty as theirs by natural right.38 They did not originate the large nineteenth-century literature purporting to prove their biological inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary can be deceptive. Both Afroand Euro-Americans used the words that today denote race, but they did not understand those words the same way. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609157) ^rw283609157 #### Race Today - The pro-slavery intellectuals' reticence in stating that conclusion publicly and forthrightly goes far to explain why the United States to this day has failed to develop a thorough, consistent, and honest political conservatism. The only historical ground that might have nourished such a tradition—namely, the slave society of the South—was contaminated by the need to humor the democratic aspirations of a propertied, enfranchised, and armed white majority. Few self-styled conservative politicians in the United States today dare argue on principle (at least in public) that hereditary inequality and subordination should be the lot of the majority. Instead, those prepared to defend inequality do so on the basis of a bastard free-market liberalism, with racial, ethnic, or sexual determinism tacked on as an inconsistent afterthought. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609158) ^rw283609158 - 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 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609160) ^rw283609160 - 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 bioand 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 - - - ## Chapter 5: Origins of the New South and the Negro Question ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - Discussion of the work "Origins of the New South, by C. Vann Woodward - the only basis for race is racism - white supremacys victims were (in very different ways) both the enslaved blacks and the lower class whites. Jim Crow was as much about lowering the living standards of all, differently of course. Could the lack of a sustained 'labor' party in the USA be attributed to the one sided alliance created between the ruling class and the white working class with white supremacy as reason. - Cultural invocations of race are as damaging and 'ideology reproducing' as biological race. ### Interesting Highlights - In a cognate maneuver, the formula "race relations" drew a sentimental curtain of Old South symbols across the New South's class relations and politics. While the curtain concealed the South's cheap labor, black and white, it also muffled the noise of anti-democratic struggles to build white supremacy. To understand that double mission of white supremacy—to hold down black people and white people alike—there exists no better source than Origins of the New South, by the great American historian C. Vann Woodward. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609162) ^rw283609162 - Then (as now), the more usual procedure was to relegate Afro-Americans to a space of their own, defined as "race relations" and set apart from the study of history properly so called. Woodward never fell into that trap. He understood that the importance of Jim Crow as a subject in no way established its validity as a method. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609163) ^rw283609163 - 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, disfranchisement, segregation, lynching, massacres, and pogroms—to the traits that constitute race. For racists in the New South, those traits might have included the Negroes' ignorance, laziness, brutality, criminality, subjection to uncontrolled passions, or incapacity for the moral and intellectual duties of civilization. For scholars in our own time who accept race, once ritually purified by the incantation socially constructed, as a valid category of analysis, the relevant traits are more likely to be "difference," "Other-ness," "culture," or "identity." Either way, however, objective acts, the real substance of racism, take second place to subjective traits, the fictive substance of race; traits that would be irrelevant to explaining racist acts even if their empirical validity could be established. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609164) ^rw283609164 - Ewing declared, no race problem arises unless "the people of one race are minded to adopt and act upon some policy more or less oppressive or repressive in dealing with the people of another race." He concluded [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609165) ^rw283609165 - But, like Ewing, he recognizes that the essence of the situation was power and the contest over it: not just the contest (grotesquely unequal as it was) between white and Afro-American people but also that among white people themselves. If allowed the rights of citizenship, Afro-Americans potentially held in their own hands the balance of power between contending groups of white people. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609166) ^rw283609166 - Tags: #politics - Proposing to decide the fate of people occupying the nominal status of citizens otherwise than with their participation and assent is a profoundly undemocratic, indeed anti-democratic, undertaking. West argues that race relations as an ideological formation of the problem, popularized with genius by Booker T. Washington, arose precisely as a way to disguise the anti-democratic essence of the problem by providing for it both a definition and a solution apparently capable of bypassing the issue of naked power that lay at its core. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609167) ^rw283609167 - Though discredited by reputable biologists and geneticists, race has enjoyed a renaissance among historians, sociologists, and literary scholars. They find the concept attractive, or in any case hard to dispense with, and have therefore striven mightily, though in vain, to find a basis for it in something other than racism. The most recent pedigree papers trace it to culture or identity, at the same time implicating its victims as agents of its imposition [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609168) ^rw283609168 - Race as culture is only biological race in polite language: No one can seriously postulate cultural homogeneity among those whose racial homogeneity scholars nonetheless take for granted. The only veil hiding the conjuror's apparatus from full view of the spectators is the quicksilver propensity of culture to change meaning from one clause to the next—now denoting something essential, now something acquired; now something bounded, now something without boundaries; now something experienced, now something ascribed.11 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609169) ^rw283609169 - The black man is not someone of a specified ancestry or culture, he decided, and certainly not someone who so identifies himself. A black man "is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia." Forced to ride Jim Crow is the key. Not identity as sense of self, but identification by others, peremptory and binding, figuring even in well-meant efforts to undo the crimes of racism. The victim's intangible race, rather than the perpetrator's tangible racism, becomes the center of attention. Thus, racist profiling goes by the misnomer "racial profiling," and the usual remedy proposed for it is to collect information about—what else?—the victims' "race." [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609161) ^rw283609161 - 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 but a type of lie, so equality and justice, once modified by racial, become euphemisms for their opposites. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609170) ^rw283609170 - "it took a lot of ritual and Jim Crow to bolster the creed of white supremacy in the bosom of a white man working for a black man's wages" (211) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609171) ^rw283609171 - Slavery was a system for the extortion of labor, not for the management of "race relations," whether by segregation or by integration. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609172) ^rw283609172 - - - ## Chapter 6: What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - Memory and 'information' as ineffectual at providing history in its full dimension - This ties into The birth of the scientific method valuing a binary of knowing / not knowing at the expense of 'wisdom'. It did not matter to be wrong factually before science, because the message of the story was the important part. Storytelling - Statue Politics were with us from the minute they were erected and they have been defaced by the victims of the people they venerate from the first. So this erasing history defence of statues and slaveholder/colonialist monuments is not just face value illogical but ignores the history of the monuments themselves - Memory and storytelling as topography, missed by the factual telling, illuminating the terrain blind to us by mere record or history written from the dominant viewpoint - The small 'guerrilla' battles lost to us by history and blindness to the terrain that pushed the parts of history we couldn't ignore , into being. ### Interesting Highlights - Nothing is more fully agreed than the certainty that memory fails. Memory fails, leaving blanks, and memory collaborates with forces separate from actual past events, forces such as an individual's wishes, a group's suggestions, a moment's connotations, an environment's clues, an emotion's demands, a self's evolution, a mind's manufacture of order, and yes, even a researcher's objectives. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609174) ^rw283609174 - I happened to read an essay that made me think further about this respectable territory of verifiable fact: "The Storyteller," by Walter Benjamin. In it he observes that the main form communication takes in the modern world is that of information, a form which, in his words, "lays claim to prompt verifiability." He goes on to characterize this development not as an advance but as an impoverishment. Storytelling dies, he says, as this new form of communication arises. Storytelling's successor, information, represents an impoverishment because, and to the degree that, the producer of information accomplishes precisely what we scholars strive to do: namely, to induce some body of material to deliver up explanation of its own accord, without our adding anything to it. "But the finest stories," according to Benjamin, "are characterized by the lack of explanation." Because the hearer or reader is left to interpret according to his own understanding, "the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks." [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609175) ^rw283609175 - According to Benjamin, it is the nature of every real story to contain "openly or covertly, something useful." And the utilities of stories include "counsel." "Counsel," he goes on, "is less an answer to a question, than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story that is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story … Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out." Anyone [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609176) ^rw283609176 - Note: This ties into The birth of the scientific method valuing a binary of knowing / not knowing. It did not matter to be wrong factually before science, because the story was the important part - And when I was a girl, they went further: they put up a life-size figure of John C. Calhoun preaching and stood it up on the Citadel Green, where it looked at you like another person in the park. Blacks took that statue personally. As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, "Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place." The "niggers" didn't like it. Even the "nigger" children didn't like it. We used to carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface that statue—scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose—because he looked like he was telling you there was a place for "niggers" and "niggers" must stay there. Children and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly that the whites had to come back and put him up high, so we couldn't get to him. That's where he stands today, on a tall pedestal. He is so far away now until you can hardly tell what he looks like [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609177) ^rw283609177 - But one learns through the testimony of inhabitants that it can at the same time be mapped out as an inward and invisible topography. It has objects analogous to mountains, rivers, and the like, which must be climbed, crossed, circumambulated, avoided, or otherwise taken into account. At the same time that these are not visible to the naked eye, and not immediately obvious to aliens on the scene, they are to insiders, much of the time, not specifically noteworthy. They remain, in the phrase of Harold Garfinkel, "seen but unnoticed" features of social life.10 As such, they enter memory. They often emerge in oral testimony as unintended memory. In actual life they are manifest, above all, as social order. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609178) ^rw283609178 - Whenever we start from a remove in time or space, these topographical features begin to seem less substantial than they are. We tend to think of them as movable by a mere movement of thought. Consider, for example, the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries whom Christopher Hill describes in The World Turned Upside Down. These people embark on militant political projects by shaking and quaking, talking in tongues, and listening to the voice of prophecy. To us, they seem to be making a bizarre detour around a God present on the ground of ordinary experience that we nevertheless cannot see. To us, it seems there are more practical, straight-ahead routes. It is as though we watch from above as human beings walk, as we might walk, across a flat heath. But, unlike us, they then turn to walk around what seems to us a nonexistent obstacle. Of course the obstacle is really there, unavoidably and materially there; but the knowledge of what it is, where it is, and that it is, they carry in memory. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609179) ^rw283609179 - my brother ain't do that, know better than that. Ain't stop to ask that girl nothin'. That other boy did, and my brother went to jail, never would own up that he ask for that drink of water. My brother went to jail in place of him. In a rush of renewed emotion, the woman had arrived at an invisible mountain and begun to walk around it. I piped up that neither one of them should have gone to jail for twenty years over asking for a drink of water, not your brother and not the other boy either. If I hadn't seen the mountain yet, the awful way she looked up at me, and then ignored me, let me see it [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609173) ^rw283609173 - One recent Tuesday night, PBS's "MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour" ended with one of its learned essays about national life. Roger Rosenblatt invited us to contemplate how Dwight D. Eisenhower, the "sleepy conservative" president, surprised those who had elected him, by "launching the civil rights era." His memory could not have been more mistaken. The launching was done by the people whose business it was. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609180) ^rw283609180 - Mrs. Burden was after a schoolbook lesson; and she was after a non-schoolbook lesson. She was determined to stop having to put herself down as "X." Gram said, "The day Mrs. Burden could go into that office and write 'Mrs. Samuel Burden,' she almost didn't need her walking stick." In fights as small-scale and personal as this one—the fight to be known by one's own name—the guerrilla war went on in the worst of times, blasting away bit by bit the invisible mountains of the Jim Crow South. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609181) ^rw283609181 - It is by trying to reconstruct things as they were by all means—those that partake in scientific method, and those that display the method's limits—that we fulfill our historic duties and, at the same time, fulfill our quintessentially human desire to know with nourishment worthy of i [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609182) ^rw283609182 - - - ## Chapter 7: Witchcraft and Racecraft: Invisible ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - The incredulity it is hard not to feel when told 'there is no scientific basis for race', - Reason as the cause, not barrier to illusory thought - Discusson of the work of Emile Durkheim - Race is the structurally built tension that is put onto its victims in the form of racism - There is logic and confirmatory patterns within the idea of race despite its false foundation, like a fantasy society, you can imagine it from scratch but then reveal logical chains and neat crossovers in the totally false world. - [[Soul]]: Durkheim tries to remove the supernatural from the description of soul, placing it in the world on 'real things done', (invisibly?). [[The Timeless Way Of Building (1979)|Alexander (1974)]] would argue that the [[The quality which has no name]] is as result of things done as well as the atomic nature affected by the nature of everything else around. I would argue this is part of Soul. It is the intangible interface between explainable natural things (atom combined behaving mildy different in their relationship to other atoms), applied with some human intention (a building, a design, an act, art) with a social context applied. - Confirming Rituals of invisible acts make them appear real. Hence a racist act applied to its victim because of their colour makes their race real in the eyes of society investigating the act. Witch trials would extract confessions, sinking (and dying) in water was proof of witchcraft. Sprits invoked to perform a hex or a cure, confirmed real by the outcome of the prayer or wish. Modern torture techniques turn victims into confessing terrorists. Circular Logic. - The invisible has visible props applied, labels, checkboxes, self definition into categories of no scientific basis (hispanic). ### Interesting Highlights #### Ontology in Its Sensible Manifestations - From the days of Thomas Jefferson, what Americans believe in as biological race has always been, at the same time, embodied and disembodied, visible and invisible [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609183) ^rw283609183 #### SHARED IRRATIONAL FEATURES OF WITCHCRAFT AND RACECRAFT - my work on racecraft, I have been struck over and over again by such intellectual commonalities with witchcraft as circular reasoning, prevalence of confirming rituals, barriers to disconfirming factual evidence, self-fulfilling prophecies, multiple and inconsistent causal ideas, and colorfully inventive folk genetics. And to these must be added varieties of more or less legitimized collective action such as gossip, exclusion, scapegoating, and so on, up to and including various forms of coercion (which is to say that the logical and methodological byways of racecraft, like those of witchcraft, are rife with dangers to body as well as to mind) [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609184) ^rw283609184 - Taken together, such traits constitute a social world whose inhabitants experience (and act on) a marrow-deep certainty that racial differences are real and consequential, whether scientifically demonstrable or not [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609185) ^rw283609185 - I take it as characteristic that the rational software of racecraft, like that of witchcraft, accommodates disconfirming evidence in additive, rather than transformative, fashion. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609186) ^rw283609186 #### SHARED RATIONAL FEATURES OF WITCHCRAFT AND RACECRAFT - the roots of racecraft are not unreason but its dignified human opposite, reason. One of Durkheim's core arguments is that reason is born in social life, but that society can exist only by being collectively imagined—that is, by constituting a real world that acquires its reality by transcending fact as available to the senses operating on their own. That aspect of reason cannot possibly be secular—open to choice—or provisional—temporary and open to disconfirming evidence. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609187) ^rw283609187 #### Invisibility and Reason - In point of fact, by selecting the term witchcraft I have foreshortened Evans-Pritchard's three-part title and the three distinct arguments that correspond to it: (1) witchcraft accusations displace structurally inbuilt social tensions onto available victims; (2) oracles work within an idiom of thought that seems bizarre but nonetheless has markedly logical and systematic features; and (3) professional specialists in magic know how to obtain (within their own logic) both true and tricked results. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609188) ^rw283609188 - Tags: #racism - Note: There is logic in racism as long as you ignore its falsified foundations - The interesting moments are those Durkheim recounts when, in the midst of human doing, soul becomes visible—for example, as blood. Then, as he says, the soul itself can be seen "from outside."13 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609189) ^rw283609189 - The inhabitants of the West once experienced in their own sensible world an invisible ontology rather like the one Appiah describes. According to Durkheim, that realm was downgraded to the designation "supernatural" only after modern science had created "awareness that there is a natural order of things."14 In making the arguments he does about reason's additions to the real, thereby making possible a human real world, Durkheim, the empirical scientist, devoted a long chapter of Forms (Book II, Chapter 8) to the concept of soul—of all things. He sets out to reconstruct soul on the terrain of real things done. Once shorn of confounding reference to the supernatural, invisibility turns out to have properties that can be explored empirically. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609190) ^rw283609190 - Note: There is more to be said on soul as a topic - Marking the terms linguistically with -craft announces that the workings of those phenomena are not open to objective or experimental demonstration, that is to say, by anyone, anywhere, and independent of doing or believing. We all can be more certain that witchcraft exists than that witches do. The same holds for racecraft and races.15 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609191) ^rw283609191 - The existence of spirits is obvious in certain settings. Belief in them is "uncontroversial" and taken to be "obviously true" in Ashanti, Appiah tells us. In daily practice, they stand no more in need of rational defense than the planets' movement around the sun would in Europe.16 According to Appiah, however, that obviousness does not arise because people use examined or consistent ideas about what spirits are or how they work, but because, despite the invisibility of crucial operations, people regularly encounter their sensible outputs. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609192) ^rw283609192 - Confirming rituals can be ceremonious and occasional, or they can be deeds that fit into the profane comings and goings of everyday life. Combining both in early modern Europe, learned Continental investigators used judicial torture in investigations of witchcraft, extracting confessions of invisible (and sometimes impossible) deeds. As St. Paul said of cheerier convictions, some things we believe by hearing and not by sight. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609193) ^rw283609193 - Note: Circular logic seen in forced witch trial confessions, also seen in modern torture confessions. Terrorist invent themselves out of nowhere. Racist acts become evidence of race. - Invisible ontologies require—and therefore acquire—anchors in sensible experience, including quasi-biological anchors. By their nature, they must be propped up and helped along, one way or another. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609194) ^rw283609194 - The invisible aspect of race becomes apparent, however, as soon as we reflect that the focus of racecraft is not the outward, visible color of a person's skin (hair type, bone structure, etc.) but the presumed inward, invisible content of that person's character. It is always black and, yellow but, white therefore, and so on, and is rarely a matter of appearance standing by itself.21 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609195) ^rw283609195 - Invisible ontologies require, and therefore acquire, visible props. But those props no more need be vulgarly empirical than do the substances extracted from Evans-Pritchard's Zande witches. Hence, the Nazis did indeed rely on their visual conception of Jews, but not so slavishly as to deny themselves help from badges and armbands. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609196) ^rw283609196 #### Invisible Ontologies, Real Worlds - But we may equally well observe that race beliefs, too, are acquired in the course of rearing and, furthermore, that the evidence that races exist is obvious. "Racial" incidents are frequent, criminals and medical patients are counted by race, statistical studies reveal racial differences in everything from death from prostate cancer to rates of decline in the incidence of teenage pregnancy. Since race is ubiquitous, that list is open to indefinite extension. One [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609197) ^rw283609197 - - - ## Chapter 8: Individuality and the Intellectuals: An Imaginary Conversation Between Emile Durkheim and W. E. B. Du Bois ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - religions as fictions - The scientific revolution in Europe created the first explorers and the accident that easy slave Labour of 'others' in conquered territory was from darker skinned people. If in another universe Africa also had the same conditions relative to Europe at the time except it's inhabitants were light skinned then some other marker would have been used as proof of race ### Interesting Highlights - Religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it. – Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609198) ^rw283609198 - Note: Related to : Fictions - Economically, its benefits were obvious, whether in America or in Europe's far-flung colonies. Morally, the "darker" races counted for less than the "lighter" ones. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609199) ^rw283609199 - Note: The scientific revolution in Europe created the first explorers and the accident that easy slave Labour of 'others' in conquered territory was from darker skinned people. If in another universe Africa also had the same conditions relative to Europe at the time except it's inhabitants were light skinn3d then some other marker would have been used as proof of race #### Individualism and the Intellectuals": - one stream of modern thinking is "swollen from the larger world … [and that] the multiplying of human wants in culture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them. Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609200) ^rw283609200 ## Conclusion: Racecraft and Inequality ### Chapter Summary & Thoughts - 'Race Relations' as disguising link between racism and inequality in general - The Crash of 2008 temporarily revealed that all this inequality was created by the ruling class, not people of colour. There was real anger, but in another accident of history, the Obama election campaign become a sponge for the energy of this unrest, real change was hoped for, a hollow electoral vessel was the outcome, the tension and energy that could have demanded change in its own right was diffused and dissipated. - The Limits of representation as a mechanism for ending systemic discrimination "Designating one Afro-American as a proxy for the rest masked the abrogation of democracy". - Work and the aspiration to work as central to the capitalist ideology. Even if it costs less to let someone not work to take care of their immediate obligations, health, children, family. [[Failing Systems cost more than Funded Systems]]. ### Interesting Highlights - what Americans designate by the shorthand "race" does not depend on physical difference, can do without visible markers, and owes nothing at all to nature. As the social alchemy of racecraft transforms racism into race, disguising collective social practice as inborn individual traits, so it entrenches racism in a category to itself, setting it apart from inequality in other guises [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609201) ^rw283609201 - Racism and those other forms of inequality are rarely tackled together because they rarely come into view together. Indeed, the most consequential of the illusions racecraft underwrites is concealing the affiliation between racism and inequality in general. Separate though they may appear to be, they work together and share a central nervous system. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609202) ^rw283609202 - The stranding of New Orleans residents during Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the lethal cumulative outcome of such inertial racism [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609203) ^rw283609203 - Note: Inertia - Segregated in neighborhoods peculiarly vulnerable to a storm surge, they were further isolated by their reliance on public transportation in an automobile-centered society. Few onlookers praised them, however, for having green credentials. Instead, their car-lessness registered as fecklessness. If they did not load family and belongings into an SUV and drive to a motel when advised to evacuate, something must be wrong with them. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609204) ^rw283609204 - Afro-Americans began their history in slavery, a class status so abnormal by the time of the American Revolution that it required an extraordinary ideological rationale—which then and ever since has gone by the name race—to fit plausibly into supposedly republican institutions.15 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609205) ^rw283609205 - The initial designation of Afro-Americans as a race on the basis of their class position has colored all subsequent discussion of inequality, even among white persons. In racial disguise, inequality wears a surface camouflage that makes inequality in its most general form—the form that marks and distorts every aspect of our social and political life—hard to see, harder to discuss, and nearly impossible to tackle. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609206) ^rw283609206 - Indeed, were every black job-seeker to be denied employment, there would still not be enough jobs for all white claimants, at a time when five people are vying for every job opening. (By the same token, as a wag once pointed out, if all the claims by white persons to have lost jobs because of preferences for black persons were valid, every black person would have to be holding down five jobs. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609207) ^rw283609207 - Thus, for example, a white electrician in Martinsville, Ohio, held food-stamp users (visualized, no doubt, as Afro-American) in such contempt that he was ashamed to tell his parents that he himself needed government help to feed his family. His own family's need did not soften that contempt when he "noticed crowds of midnight [food-stamp] shoppers once a month when benefits get renewed." Though a food-stamp user himself, out at midnight on legitimate business, he assumed that the people in the crowds were not on legitimate business. "Generally, if you're up at that hour and not working, what are you into?" he remarked.23 Racism tagged the midnight shoppers as "into" something unsavory because they appeared to be out of work; racecraft concealed the truth that the electrician and the midnight shoppers suffer under the same regime of inequality. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609208) ^rw283609208 - The racecrafters contrived, via television, a collective hypnosis that stigmatized hardworking black people, while concealing the regime of inequality. Smoke from the fire of white workers' rage obscured the air-conditioned boardrooms where executives chose overseas destinations for North Carolina's manufacturing jobs, heedless of whether those left without work were white or black.26 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609209) ^rw283609209 - What happens when nothing is stepping down the current and inequality appears, full power, as what it is? Perhaps what happened during the fall of 2008, when a public outcry led the House of Representatives to vote against using the taxpayers' money to rescue failed bankers from the consequences of their own greed, incompetence, and folly. For a long moment, ordinary American taxpayers regardless of ancestry vented their outrage. "Tea Party" sentiments began to percolate, if not yet to crystallize or coalesce.28 Fuming while bankers received what they considered their due and while CEOs landed in Washington, one-man-one-jet, to stake their claim for public assistance, working Americans of all backgrounds seemed to demand simultaneously: "Wait just a cotton-pickin minute." There stood the culprits, the outrageous embodiment of privilege in the midst of everyone else's loss. Their every gesture amplified Obama's call for Change. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609210) ^rw283609210 - Tags: [[usa]] [[politics]] - The opposition party rescued a discredited president's plan to save the top 1 percent of the population, once again, at the expense of everybody else. Still, a fissure had opened through which one might glimpse, or at least imagine, a politics in which the mass at the bottom might stake a claim against the arrogant entitlement of the few at the top. The election of Obama held the potential, under those circumstances, to lift the taboo on public discussion of inequality. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609211) ^rw283609211 - Note: Instead the election of Obama diffused unrest and potential for real change into a hollow electoral vessel - The honest accounting that the collapse called for soon veered off-track, however. In mass-media commentary, the up-to-the-eyeballs indebtedness of the average household became a moral failing of the borrowers (incidentally opening a portal for racecraft), rather than the consequence of a skewed economic setup. By a subtle shifting of the kaleidoscope, the excess ceased to be that of bankers celebrating a coup in the mortgage market with $3,000 bottles of wine at lunch and became, instead, that of Jane Doe, who fulfilled a modest dream of owning her own home, for a brief while. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609212) ^rw283609212 - First-time homeownership, once deemed praiseworthy, became instead the object of scorn: Ms. Doe was consuming above her place. The shadow of racecraft reached beyond Americans of African descent to darken the horizon of a wide swath of working Americans regardless of ancestry. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609213) ^rw283609213 - Meanwhile, as the jobs of ordinary workers went up in smoke, those responsible for the disaster imagined themselves its victims, and the media amplified their voices [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609214) ^rw283609214 - their very harping on Obama as a "black president" reprised an age-old feature of racecraft: the turning of one person of African descent into a synecdoche for all. The classic historical instance is Booker T. Washington, anointed by powerful white persons to speak on behalf of all Afro-Americans, because disfranchisement had robbed them of the democratic prerogative of choosing spokesmen for themselves. Designating one Afro-American as a proxy for the rest masked the abrogation of democracy.44 [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609215) ^rw283609215 - Note: The Limits of representation as a mechanism for ending systemic discrimination - Racecraft is a ready-made propaganda weapon for use against the aspirations of the great majority of working Americans. Sooner or later, tacitly or openly, any move to tackle inequality brings racecraft into play. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609216) ^rw283609216 - The city and state of New York and the federal government together pay a registered family day-care provider to look after a woman's children while she works at a low-paying, dead-end job as a waitress at an all-night diner. (Her husband has lost his job.) The day-care provider costs more than the waitress receives, or is ever likely to receive, in wages. The mother sometimes has to rouse her children in the middle of the night when she collects them from the day-care provider at the end of a late 10-hour shift.61 It would be hard for her to visit her children's school, oversee their homework, or read to them. She may even have trouble managing appointments for the children's (and her own) dental and medical care. The thinkable, within the terms of reference of the prevailing ideology of inequality, is that a low-paying, dead-end, menial job is better than offering the mother a cash welfare payment, no matter how unwholesome the outcome for the children's or the mother's well-being. The inhumanity of that judgment can be readily made to vanish in the smoke of racecraft. [◊](https://readwise.io/open/283609217) ^rw283609217 - - -