Whiteness Talk and Class Talk

07-09-2020

Roger Berkowitz

Daniel Denvir interviews Barbara Fields and Karen Fields, the sisters who wrote the extraordinary book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. The Field sisters coin the word “Racecraft” to name the magical process through which the fiction of race is made real. When a police officer who is black is conjured as a black man, this conjuring trick is what allows that officer to be discriminated against or even killed. And then the targets and purveyors of racism come to believe they are what the magic of racecraft has made them to be. As Karen Fields explains, 

“Racecraft encompasses the fact that the race that is pictured by the subjects as real in fact is not; it’s made to be real and envisioned collectively as something real. People begin to think, “I have a racial identity, I have a race. As a black  person or white person, I have certain characteristics: I’m smart; I deserve to be at the bottom, and so on.” These things are programmed into people through the activity of doing that first thing, the act that is ostensibly based on heritage. That puts somebody in his or her place.”

A focus of the interview is the way that racism and liberal anti-racists evacuate the class content of American society and talk about racism in a vacuum. Barbara Fields explains: 

There has also been a period of such intense political demobilization that large numbers of people — certainly it’s true for people the age of my students, but it’s also true of the people who like to think of themselves as the opinion-setters, the scribbling and babbling classes, the people who write for the general public, and so on — can’t tell which end is up.

My sister and I are old enough that we were at the 1963 March of Washington, which has now become almost a mythic event. One thing that is indelibly part of our memory of that occasion is that many of the people in the crowd that assembled were wearing the insignia of the UAW, International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Steelworkers, Mineworkers, and so on. The march’s official designation was a March for Jobs and Freedom. It was part of political mobilization at that time: in the midst of the Cold War and the purges, people understood the connection between labor and civil rights. The honorary leader, the person’s whose idea it was, A. Philip Randolph, was a labor organizer, a union activist as well as an activist in demanding rights for black people. Those connections were so natural that even dummies and political novices understood them. They have been gone for a long time and the result is that when somebody in the press says working class or working-class voters, they invariably mean white people. They forgot that most Afro-Americans in this country are working people. Most Latinos, however you define that ambiguous term, are working people. Southeast Asian migrants, most of them are working people, and indeed the same is true of a good many East Asian migrants.

We have allowed that language to become part of the whiteness talk. The result is that when things happen — as they are happening hot and heavy today targeted against working people — our reaction fragments us so that we cannot even talk about it that way. It’s this attack on people of color or that attack on black people, or immigrants, or Dreamers, or whatever it is. We’re not going to get anywhere that way, because we have defined any possible political alliance out of existence before we even tried to build it. If Ta-Nehisi Coates — I like him a lot, by the way, and have only met him a couple of times and some of his work is deeply moving — but if he were right about the situation, you would have to say there is no exit; there is nothing we can do. It reminds me of what people would say about the prospect of nuclear war back in the days when we had air-raid drills: the only thing you can do about it is put your head between your legs and kiss your behind goodbye.

That seems to be the political prescription that comes out of the primordial white racism argument. There’s nothing to do about it but to put your head between your legs and kiss your behind goodbye.