'Racecraft'
The historian Barbara Fields and her sister, the sociologist Karen Fields, open Racecraft, their collection of linked essays, by denying that there are such things as races. Race today does not, they point out, refer to ‘a traditionally named group of people’ but to ‘a statistically defined population’. So, for example, the determining factor in susceptibility to sickle cell anaemia, long thought of as a ‘black disease’, is whether you have ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa, which many of the people we think of as black do not, and some of the people we think of as white do. So, too, the relevant genetic information about a person is individual and familial, not racial. A person’s height, for example is determined mainly by the height of his or her actual ancestors, partly by environmental factors and not at all by the statistical entity that counts as his or her race. Thus, against developments like the growing demand for more ‘accurate’ racial designations and the recognition of biracial and multiracial identities, the Fieldses remind us that there are no accurate racial designations and no bi or multiracial identities. Genetically speaking, it makes no more sense to describe someone with, say, a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father as a person of mixed race than it would to describe someone with a tall mother and a short father as a person of mixed height. That we even have the idea there is such a thing as mixed race is a testament to our disarticulation of race from biological facts.
Which is where racecraft comes in. If today there is widespread agreement about the inadequacy of race as a biological concept, agreement is just as widespread that race is instead a social construction or, as the Fieldses put it, a ‘social fact’ – ‘like six o’clock, both an idea and a reality’. In Racial Formation in the United States (1986), the theorists of race Michael Omi and Howard Winant urged us not only to resist the ‘temptation’ to think of race as a biological essence but also and especially to resist the temptation to conclude that if it isn’t biological it’s a ‘mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some ideal non-racist social order would eliminate’. We aren’t, after all, tempted to think that because it’s never six o’clock in nature six o’clock is an illusion. Why should the fact that there are no races in nature cause us to doubt the existence of race?
But the neologism ‘racecraft’ is modelled on ‘witchcraft’, and is intended to suggest just such doubts. It isn’t that the Fieldses regard the commitment to race as a category as an irrational superstition. On the contrary, they are interested precisely in exploring its rationality – the role that beliefs about race play in structuring American society – while at the same time reminding us that those beliefs may be rational but they’re not true. As Tzvetan Todorov pointed out a long time ago, the fact that some women were once thought of as witches and sometimes burned as witches did not make them witches, even socially constructed ones, and the conceptual incoherence of the social construction of race is at least as clear. We no longer believe that one drop of black blood makes a black person not because we think it takes more than one drop but because we don’t think there is any such thing as black blood. What we think instead is that social practices like Jim Crow racialised both black and white populations. Of course, the people who invented and enforced Jim Crow did think there was such a thing as black blood, and although they were mistaken, their views were at least coherent: if there are such things as black blood or white genes, then the people who have them are indeed black and white. Once it was discovered that this wasn’t true, however, there were no longer grounds for people to continue treating each other as black or white. If I say that I treat you as black because I think you have black genes, I’ve given you a bad reason; if I say I treat you as black not because you have black genes but because I used to think you had black genes, I haven’t given you any reason at all.
The point is the same when people on whom race was imposed impose it instead on themselves. Some of the women who were burned as witches may have believed they were witches. But they were wrong. In an early defence of social construction, Sartre described a Jew not as someone with Jewish blood but as someone whom others take to have Jewish blood. And his advice was, essentially, choose to be what they say you are. But how, exactly, can you follow this advice? If you think you’re a Jew only because they think you’re a Jew, and they think you’re a Jew only because they believe in Jewish blood, what does your Jewishness consist in other than an endorsement of their error?
