Fields, Karen E.; Fields, Barbara J. Racecraft: the soul of inequality in American Life

Abstract

Karen and Barbara Fields are sisters and according to US racial convention – the principal object of analysis of this book, its openly iconoclastic ending, and the indignation of the authors –, are ‘Afro-Americans’ by definition. However, in this book they do not intend to dispute the use of other words in racial and original terminologies. Much to the contrary, the prefer to leave clear that as an intellectual project, rather than the freedom of choice between typologies, they defend the uprooting of the ideology of the ‘social construction of race’ (racecraft) from political discourse and social proposals. In an analysis which intends to illuminate how this ideology has updated and kept itself contemporary since the American Revolution, the authors emphatically seek to demonstrate what they consider to be at the same time an irrationality, an intellectual fraud, a historiographic evasion, a political crime, and an ethical problem. From a centenarian family in South Carolina, based in Charleston – a city emblematic in Southern memory thanks to the importance of illustrious citizens in the Confederacy and the defense of slavery –, they problematized their intellectual apprenticeships and family memories to show that the manipulation of racial classification has strategic and ethical limits. Heirs of a now practically defunct tradition, anti-racism as a program with roots in the New Left in an age of liberal agendas and multi-culturalisms, they talk from within this tradition which reached them in the 1960s in the long history of struggles and civil disobedience against Jim Crow1 and the racism reproduced in the ideology of the ‘social construction of race.’