Tackling the myth of a post-racial society
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
20th-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.
A most impressive work, tackling a demanding and important
topic-the myth that we now live in a postracial society-in a novel,
urgent, and compelling way. The authors dispel this myth by
squarely addressing the paradox that racism is scientifically
discredited but, like witchcraft before it, retains a social
rationale in societies that remain highly unequal and averse to
sufficiently critical engagement with their own history and
traditions. -- Robin Blackburn
With examples ranging from the profound to the absurd-including,
for instance, an imaginary interview with W.E.B. Du Bois and Emile
Durkheim, as well as personal porch chats with the authors'
grandmother-the Fields delve into 'racecraft's' profound effect on
American political, social and economic life. * Global Journal
*
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 *
The neologism 'racecraft' is modelled on 'witchcraft' . 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. -- Walter Benn Michaels * London Review of Books *
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
Demanding and intelligent. -- Jennifer Vega * PopMatters *
Racecraft forces a quite profound reconsideration of familiar
categories, by navigating between what is real and what is made-up,
and by deeply probing how economic inequality gets reproduced. It
is impossible to read this rich book without being challenged and
enlightened. -- Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the
Origins of Our Time
I love the simple elegance with which they hammer home that race is
a montrous fiction, racism is a monstrous crime. -- Junot Diaz,
author of This is How You Lose Her
This is a very thoughtful book, a very urgent book. * The Academic
& The Artist Cloudcast *
Barbara and Karen Fields show that racism creates race, not the
other way around. So correct. So on point. -- Ta-Nehisi Coates
[Racecraft] should be more widely read than it is-no matter
its current reach. In it, the authors achieve an intelligence and
agility that is rare in discussions of identity, racism, and
inequality. -- Matthew McKnight * Nation *
Liberal mores against overt racism are crumbling in the face of
Trump. We must build them better...The Fields sisters dive through
sociology, history, and science to reach the material truth: races
is a product of racism, not the other way around. -- Charlie Heller
* Paste Magazine *
Fundamentally challenged some of my oldest and laziest ideas about
race. -- Zadie Smith
Ostensibly 'antiracist' politics that treat racial categories as if
they were real...perpetuate what they purport to resist. As this
form of counterproductive antiracism becomes hegemonic in our
culture, the Fieldses' insights are increasingly salient. -- Blake
Smith * Washington Examiner *
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