Abstract
In the closing decades of the 1990s, when I began my academic career, racial attitudes research reigned supreme. A PhD classmate of mine had recently scored the “holy grail”—an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin and a sole authored article in The American Journal of Sociology that used an array of sophisticated statistical techniques to argue that “changes in white racial attitudes” were a result of “changes in the level of group threat presented by the subordinate group to the dominant group” (Quillian 1996:817). My department chair was a leading scholar in racial attitudes research who, in addition to his own book, Beliefs About Inequality, (Kluegel 1986) had recently published a chapter in the much talked about book Racial Attitudes in the 1990s: Continuity and Change. His chapter promised to bring “greater theoretical coherence” to such hotly debated questions as whether and in what direction “white racial attitudes” were shifting and, thus, make clear “the real state of racial attitudes and black-white relations” (Bobo, Klugel, and Smith 1997:15). Quantitative methods ruled the day. The editors of Racial Attitudes in the 1990s marveled that “modern sampling techniques” had advanced to the degree that there was now “more survey data on racial attitudes than on any other topic” thus yielding the possibility that a never-ending array of new statistical techniques could be marshaled to answer these questions (Smith 1997:14). My former classmate, for example, made use of such (to me anyway) confusing and complex maneuvers as “confirmatory factor analysis using Methuen’s LISCOMP program” and “polychronic correlation matrices” (Quillian 1996:855). To say that such things were “all Greek to me” would be a colossal understatement. I was a dreadfully poor statistics student and thus felt inadequate to challenge these propositions, even though I was profoundly skeptical of them.
My father (who also happened to be a sociologist) recommended the article, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology” (reprinted in Racecraft, chapter 4) which had been published in the New Left Review a few years before. To say that reading Fields and Fields (2012) article was “world-altering” would be a tremendous understatement. I was particularly struck by this paragraph: Ideology is not a material entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment, spread like a rumor, or impose like a code of dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of dissociated beliefs—‘attitudes’ is the favored jargon amongst American social scientists and the historians they have mesmerized—that you can extract from their context and measure by current or retrospective survey research. (Someday the reification of conduct and demeanor in “attitudes” will seem as quaint and archaic as their reification in bodily “humors”—phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, sanguine) does now. Nor is it a Frankenstein’s monster that takes on a life of its own. (p. 135)
Fields’s article was so enlightening because it not only challenged the explanatory value of the “racial attitudes” paradigm but also the one that sought to displace it—the “structural racism/racialized social systems” paradigm. Prior to encountering Fields, in my search for an alternative to the “racial attitudes” paradigm, I had become quite captivated by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s article “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Interpretation.” The article was a searing critique of attitudes research. Then (as now) I agreed with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s (1997) observation that attitudes research was circular because it did not ground racism in social relations and enthusiastically embraced his suggestion to search for racism’s “structural foundation” (p. 469). Initially, the idea of viewing American history as a series of “racialized social systems” appealed to me. As did the idea that all societies had a “racial structure” wherein individuals acted according to their “racial interests” (Bonilla Silva 1997:473, 471).
Fields (2012) challenged many of the core assumptions of structural racism theory that I held dear. One of the primary ones being that race could and should be viewed as both “a coherent analytical category and a valid empirical datum” (p. 100). For a very long time I saw these ideas as axiomatic. To think anything else—particularly in light of our ever-increasing knowledge of “racial disparities” in every aspect of American life—seemed to fly in the face of reality. Fields was the first scholar I encountered who saw the endlessly proliferating statistical measures of racial disparities not as “hard” scientific “facts” but as a type of “conjurors trick.” The parallels she drew between witchcraft and racecraft are beautifully illustrated in her characterization of disparities research as a “real action” that reliably produced and reproduced “evidence for the imagined thing” (Field 2012:22). Although historians and media pundits, rather than sociologists, are usually the targets of Fields’s (2012) pointed wit and wisdom, we are also “specialists in magic” who use our theories and methods to “obtain within [our] own logic both true and tricked results” (P. 201). She continued, For us, as for bygone believers in witches, daily life produces an immense accumulation of supporting evidence for belief[s]. Think no further than the media-born miscellany of things tabulated by ‘race’—from hardy perennials like teenage pregnancy to novelties like “under-representation amongst blood donors” and ‘disproportionate representation on Twitter’—constantly churning out factitious evidence for an ever-expanding American immensity, the so-called racial divide. (Fields 2012:24)
For some time, I believed that viewing race as a “social construction” was a way to “have it both ways”—to accept that race was a product of history, but also to wield it as an “independent variable” to explain social outcomes. Bonilla-Silva (1997), for example, argued that although the initial placement of people in racial categories stemmed from “the interests of powerful actors in the social system (e.g., the capitalist class, the planter class, colonizers)”—something that Fields would heartily agree with—he then goes on to argue that “race became an independent element of the social system” (p. 473).
Fields summarily dismisses this view. It was simultaneously devastating and liberating to read her description of “social construction” as a “spell for the purification of race” so that it may be used as a valid category of analysis by positing that “races” are discrete and coherent entities with discrete and coherent “interests” that cause them to act in reliable and predictable ways (Fields 2012:100, 151): [T]he trite formula, “race is a social construction” [is] meant to spare those who invoke race in historical explanation the raised eyebrows that would greet someone who, studying a crop failure, proposed witchcraft as an independent variable. But identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters. (Fields 2012:100)
If “constructivist” theories cannot provide us with sufficiently solid intellectual ground, what theoretical framework can? Fortunately for us sociologists, Fields doesn’t just show us how we have gone theoretically astray, she provides us with a compass and a map that puts us back on the right path. Armed with the theoretical tools of historical materialism, Fields is able to proceed from the assumption that race is a “social construction” and not only give a nuanced analysis of who did the constructing but also explain why and how.
Beyond Social Construction: Historical Materialism, Structure, and Ideology
It is quite important to highlight that Fields is a Marxist historian because structural racism theory was posed as an explicit rebuttal of Marxism. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (1997:466–67) framed his intervention as a corrective to the “limitations of the orthodox Marxist view” which sees “class and class struggle as the central explanatory variables of social life.” His principal complaint about historical materialism is that it “reduces racism to a legitimating ideology used by the bourgeoisie to divide the working class.” One of the aims of structural racism theory, therefore, is to push back against the view that racism is a “baseless ideology, ultimately dependent upon other, ‘real’ forces in society.” The way in which Fields uses historical materialism as a tool to analyze slavery and Jim Crow demonstrates that racism is, indeed, a divisive legitimating ideology wielded by the ruling class. However, because the way that she conceptualizes class is grounded in historical materialism, she goes far beyond this. Bonilla Silva is correct that Marxists view “class dynamics as the real engine of racial dynamics.” However, he does not fully understand or appreciate how historical materialists define class dynamics. Like many sociologists, Bonilla-Silva (1997:471) views class as an ascriptive attribute of an individual or group. “Because racial actors are classed and gendered,” he explains, “analysis must control for class and gender to ascertain the material advantage enjoyed by a dominant race.” Historical materialists, like Fields, view class as the relationship an individual or group has to the means of production. The direct producers of value (the enslaved, the working class, peasants, or the proletariat) are in an antagonistic relationship to the appropriators of value (slave owners, capitalists, feudal lords, the bourgeoisie). For historical materialists, class refers to the processes of capital accumulation (i.e., slavery, wage labor, share-cropping, etc.) and the class struggles through which they take place.
“Probably the majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as a system of race relations,” Fields (2012:116) wrote. After the publication of “Rethinking Racism: Towards a Structural Interpretation” a majority of sociologists (I include myself among them) did too. The structural racism paradigm views slavery as a “racialized social system” that secured “the domination of Blacks in the United States . . . through dictatorial means” (Bonilla Silva 1997:470). Fields (2012) showed me the analytical dead end that awaited those who forgot that “slavery was a system for the extortion of labor, not for the management of ‘race relations,’ whether by segregation or integration” and thus proceeded “as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy, rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco” (P. 160, 116).
Whereas the “racialized social systems approach” sees a basic continuity over historical periods—White supremacy endures over time, simply changing its form—Fields sees radical change. “The abolition of slavery revolutionized the social relations of the old plantations,” she explains, “even where it made no discernable difference in the personnel” (B. J. Fields 1985:81).
Fields contrasts the pre- and post-War South, not in terms of their racial ideologies but in terms of their internal social relations of production, noting critically that “the appropriation of the slave’s surplus rested on direct domination of the producer through ownership of his person” (B. J. Fields 1983:9). To understand the rise of Jim Crow, therefore, she begins with this basic fact: “The planters had to find a way to reinstate their privileged access to the surplus product of those who had been slaves” (B. J. Fields 1983:17). Emancipation meant that the appropriators had to use market compulsion to access the labor of the formerly enslaved. The denial of suffrage, convict leasing, brutal segregation, and racial terror of Jim Crow arose becuase “those who expected the freedmen to respond automatically and predictably to wage incentives soon saw their error” (B. J. Fields 1983:9).
Unfortunately, Racecraft does not include two essays that Fields produced earlier in her career, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture: The New South in a Bourgeois World” (1985) and “The Nineteenth Century American South: History and Theory,” (1983) both of which beautifully explain the connection between the rise of the Jim Crow social and legal order and the transformations that occurred in the processes of capital accumulation post-Civil War. This class-based struggle, which obviously had strongly racist dimensions, occurred within the context of the “forced incorporation” of the South into the “Northern based capitalistic economic system” as a “peripheral capitalist region” (B. J. Fields 1983:8). The peripheral aspect of their incorporation cannot be overlooked. The South’s “forced reunion” with their “Northern conquerors occurred on a subaltern basis”—the Southern elite did not control the national banking system, were heavily indebted, were at a gross disadvantage when competing with Northern capital, and faced sagging world demand for cotton (B. J. Fields 1983:11). In no way does she underplay the importance of racism in this dynamic. Because the planters had to “share” their access to the surplus produced by cultivators (who were still majority Black) with Northern capitalists, they “tightened the screws on those subject to their power” (B. J. Fields 1983:11). In “The Advent of Capitalism: The New South in a Bourgeois World,” she further explains that the production relations that emerged in the ex-Confederate South—the crop-lien system, sharecropping, and debt-peonage—“represented no shining victory of the planters,” rather it “betrayed their weakness, their inability to carry through the transition to capitalism fully on their own terms” (B. J. Fields 1985:84).
The notion that sharecropping and the crop-lien system could be seen as evidence of the weakness of the planter class was nothing short of a revelation. It flew in the face of all that I had been taught about “White Supremacy.” Fields’s analysis of Jim Crow—a conceptual and historical anchor for not only the racialized social systems approach but also the concept of “color blind racism”—profoundly changed my world view. Because she focuses on political economy and class struggle, Fields provides quite different and more nuanced explanation of Jim Crow in the past that opens up a much richer analytical terrain for understanding racism in the present.
The Present as History: A Critique of Racialized Social Systems, Color-Blind Racism, and the “New Jim Crow”
When the Jim Crow period is conceptualized as a “racialized social system” the statement “the historical struggle against chattel slavery led not to the development of race-free societies but to the establishment of social systems with a different kind of racialization” makes sense (Bonilla-Silva 1997: 470). It certainly did to me. As did the notion that “in contrast to race-relations in the Jim Crow period, however, racial practices that produce racial inequality in contemporary America (1) are increasingly covert, (2) are embedded in normal operations of institutions, (3), avoid direct racial terminology, and (4) are invisible to most Whites” (Bonilla Silva 1997:476). The racialized social systems approach and the color-blind racism theory hinge on the idea that “what has happened is that white supremacy in the United States (i.e., the racial structure of America has changed. Today ‘new racism’ practices have emerged that are more sophisticated and subtle than those typical of the Jim Crow era” (Bonilla-Silva 2014:25).
Barbara J. Fields (1982:156) reminds us that “White supremacy is a slogan, not a belief” and is not well understood if it is simply seen as a “summary of color prejudices.” Rather, it is better conceptualized as “a set of political programs, differing according to the social position of their proponents.” She notes that yeoman farmers, poor Whites, and planters held “diametrically opposed” positions on taxation, credit policy, debt relief, and rules on representation in state legislatures (to name just a few issues). Disenfranchisement was not simply a racial maneuver designed to ensure White dominance over African Americans. Although it surely was that, it also operated as a form of class power, to ensure the domination of the declining Southern bourgeoisie over their multiracial working class. Disenfranchisement not only stripped African Americans of the vote, but also gave one class faction of White people control over everyone. This “rigging” so reduced the power of working people to engage in struggles that would eliminate (or at least reduce) the power of capital it “prepared the way for the apathy that steadily reduced electoral participation, a trend that has continued into the present” (Fields 2012:156).
When history is seen as a succession of “struggles to either transform or maintain a particular racial order” (Bonilla-Silva 1997:470) our analytical eyes become far more attuned to the different ideologies that express that order, rather than the class contest and struggle (i.e., the political economy) that is the structural foundation upon which the ideologies rest. The interpretive framework of “Color-blind” racism, for example, is primarily concerned with ideologies. “Color-blind racism,” the book Racism Without Racists explains, is “a new racial ideology . . . that explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of non-racial dynamics” (Bonilla-Silva 2014:2). While this is indeed true, a focus on ideology leads to an unhelpful focus on how covert or overt expressions of racial animus are. Indeed, the “overt” vs. “covert” binary sits at the heart of the “color blind racism” and/or “new racism” conceptual framework. Thus, we are told that “whereas Jim Crow racism explained blacks social standing as the result of their biological and moral inferiority color-blind racism avoids such facile arguments” and “in contrast to the Jim Crow era, where racial inequality was enforced through overt means . . . today racial practices operate in a ‘now you see it now, you don’t’ fashion” (Bonilla-Silva 2014:3). While this worldview captures the surface-level attributes of Jim Crow, it remains “trapped” within the terrain of racial ideology and thus makes Jim Crow “impossible to analyze rationally” or “deal with historically” (Fields 2012:119).
The overtness or covertness of the expression of racist animus has tremendous implications for people living in a particular era—and thus cannot be denied either by them or the analyst seeking to understand their social circumstance. Although Fields sees racism as an ideology that mediates and expresses class conflict and exploitation, she in no way implies that it is baseless. Ideologies, she explains, are “the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which [people and societies] create and recreate their collective being.” As such, they are “not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand” (Fields 2012:134). Until reading Fields, I had no issue with the idea that American history should be seen as a succession of racialized social systems. I came to see, however, that defining eras not by their racial ideologies, but rather by their social property relations, and charting the changes over time in social property relations, rather than ideologies, is a much better way of defining social systems. Defining eras in terms of their social property relations allows us to see much more clearly when, how, and what aspects of a social system change over time.
Conclusion: Whither “The Sociology of Race”
When I began my career, what we now term “the sociology of race” had a different name: The Sociology of Race Relations. The new nomenclature may disguise our historical origins, but has not banished them. “Race Relations,” Fields reminds us, was a concept and phrase borne out of the Jim Crow era. It has “outlasted the regime that gave birth to it and continues in wide use.” One of the assumptions underlying the concept that continues to haunt and bedevil contemporary sociological wisdom is that it is still permissible to “relegate African-Americans to a space of their own, defined as ‘race relations’ set apart from the study of history properly so called” (Fields 2012:150). Perhaps the most important lesson she teaches contemporary sociologists is that “the importance of Jim Crow as a subject in no way establishes its validity as a method.” This mistaken way of thinking underlies the view that “a society’s racial organization” should be the focus of analytical attention (Bonilla-Silva 1997:473). It also authorizes a way of looking at history which proceeds from the assumption that “after a society becomes racialized, racialization develops a life of its own” (Bonilla-Silva 1997:475). Neither of these approaches to our past gives of a sound basis for understanding our present.
Barbara Fields was not trained as a sociologist. Paradoxically, it is because (rather than in spite) of this that she has produced some of the finest sociological work the field has ever seen.