Brute Ideology

[unrepentant progress]

A classic essay by Barbara Fields, originally published in 1990, provides the historical foundation of the critique outlined in Racecraft. The premise of the essay, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” is that “when virtually the whole of society … commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the slightest examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather it is ideology.” Her definition of “ideology” is unapologetically Marxist and refreshingly orthodox; it is the day-to-day vocabulary of prevailing economic and social relationships. And the material foundation of racist ideology in the United States, Fields argues, was slavery.

The connections between race-thinking and ritual are made plain in another classic essay, “Witchcraft and Racecraft: Invisible Ontology in Its Sensible Manifestations,” written by Karen Fields. Both witchcraft and racecraft, she argues, are patterns of thought that lead otherwise sensible people to uncritically believe in non-existent things. Each represents a commitment to an “invisible ontology”—a rational (which is not to say accurate) way of explaining how things came to be a certain way, an accounting of cause and consequence. In the case of witchcraft, for example, the surface features of repeated bad luck—hit by a truck, fell from a tree, hit by another truck—make sense when interpreted as serial manifestations of a single underlying curse. Likewise, the impoverished, excluded, stigmatized, and imprisoned are viewed as racially different. Witchcraft and racecraft—unlike witches and race—are things that actually exist. They help make sense of the invisible order that underlies the palpable experience of everyday life; they revivify belief through its incessant ritualization.

Racecraft concludes with an essay on the question of inequality in the contemporary United States. While the vast majority of recipients of public assistance in the United States self-identify as “white,” the common association of poverty with blackness, argue the authors, has foreclosed the possibility of a thoroughgoing critique of inequality. Any effort to provide what should be basic rights—“a decent job, a solid education, health care, dignity in old age”—is ultimately forestalled by the association of “government entitlements” with “black people.” In speaking of the racial politics of the Obama presidency, Fields and Fields observe that the “inclination to shun identification with black Americans makes it impossible for him [Obama] to identify with the modest wage and salary-earners, the unemployed, and the working and disabled poor of all ancestries; in short, the bottom 99 percent of American society.” “Racecraft,” Fields and Fields conclude, “shrinks our mental world to its own pusillanimous measure.”

Full review: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/brute-ideology