Racecraft, Karen E. Fields
Racecraft, Karen E. Fields
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Racecraft
The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Author: Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields

Narrator: Karen Chilton

Unabridged: 10 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/09/2021

Synopsis

Tackling the myth of a post-racial societyMost 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.

About Karen E. Fields

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.

About Barbara J. Fields

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mike on April 11, 2016

Three stars not for the ideas, but for my personal reading experience. The basic ideas here, the way the authors are able to trace the establishment of American racial ideology, the way they explain the impetus for racist pseudo-science, are...well, just look at all the other reviews here. It's all......more

Goodreads review by Inna on June 17, 2013

Brilliant work. The authors adopt Durkheimian approach to explain why, even though we all know that race is a cultural construct, it is still such a basic part of American culture. Their point is that since every society needs some basic principles which cannot be questioned to sustain its stability......more

Goodreads review by Conor on September 24, 2017

This is a powerful and highly intelligent exploration of the idea that racecraft is no more legitimate than witchcraft, and that the racism that follows from it is no more natural or explicable than the development of superstitions and punishments that flowed from centuries of adamant belief in witc......more

Quotes

“It’s not just a challenge to racists, it’s a challenge to people like me, it’s a challenge to African-Americans who have accepted the fact of race and define themselves by the concept of race.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates“Fundamentally challenged some of my oldest and laziest ideas about race.”
—Zadie Smith“Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields have undertaken a great untangling of how the chimerical concepts of race are pervasively and continuously reinvented and reemployed in this country.”
—Maria Bustillos, Los Angeles Review of Books

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