A new edition of a celebrated contemporary work on race and racism
BARBARA J. FIELDS is Professor of History at Columbia
University, author of Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground and
coauthor of Free at Last.
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, Lemon Swamp and Other Places,
and a retranslation of Emile Durkheim's masterpiece, The Elementary
Forms of Religious Life. She has two works in progress: Bordeaux's
Africa, and Race Matters in the American Academy.
“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
“These essays are extraordinary. I love the forceful elegance with
which they hammer home that race is a monstrous fiction,
racism is a monstrous crime.”
—Junot Díaz
“Demanding and intelligent.”
—Jennifer Vega, PopMatters
“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
“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
“[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
“With examples ranging from the profound to the absurd—including,
for instance, an imaginary interview with W.E.B. Dubois 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
“This is a very thoughtful book, a very urgent book.”
—The Academic & The Artist Cloudcast
“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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