A must read for folks in the States. Picked it up on a Ta-Nehisi Coates recommendation many years ago and finally got around to it. Challenges many deeply held beliefs held about "race". The word "racecraft" is a spin on "witchcraft", the complex mechanisms in which people believe in something which has no scientific foundation. A dense one, will probably have to revisit this one every couple of years.
Brilliant work. The authors adopt Durkheimian approach to explain why, even though we all know that race is a cultural construct, it is still such a basic part of American culture. Their point is that since every society needs some basic principles which cannot be questioned to sustain its stability (they compare race in US to witchcraft in Africa) and since race was so basic to US culture, first as justification for slavery and later as a disguise for class, it will take much more than rational analysis to make such a principle disappear. Largely since, no matter what people say, racial differences in US and witchcraft in Africa seem so sensible, even if people would not admit to it. To address the evolving resistance towards racism in US, according to the authors, developed something they call racecraft - ways to address race, whatever it might be, in a racist …
Brilliant work. The authors adopt Durkheimian approach to explain why, even though we all know that race is a cultural construct, it is still such a basic part of American culture. Their point is that since every society needs some basic principles which cannot be questioned to sustain its stability (they compare race in US to witchcraft in Africa) and since race was so basic to US culture, first as justification for slavery and later as a disguise for class, it will take much more than rational analysis to make such a principle disappear. Largely since, no matter what people say, racial differences in US and witchcraft in Africa seem so sensible, even if people would not admit to it. To address the evolving resistance towards racism in US, according to the authors, developed something they call racecraft - ways to address race, whatever it might be, in a racist way, specifically in the context of Afro-Americans, so that it will not sound racist, but an objective evaluation. In this context they analyze both everyday and scientific discourses.
The authors, while dealing with their main topic, address several other interesting issues like the workings of ideology and different ways to handle interviews for historical research.
