Racecraft

“Witchcraft has no moving parts of its own, and needs none. It acquires perfectly adequate moving
parts when a person acts upon the reality of the imagined thing; the real action creates evidence for the
imagined thing. By that route, belief of that sort constantly dumps factitious evidence for itself into the
real world.”

“Unlike the units of bio-racism, populations defined by allele frequency are not held to be visible to the
naked eye, or knowable in advance of disciplined investigation.”

“Today's probabilistic methods and molecular-biological evidence by no means compel resort to the
folk system. Indeed, they would seem to be incompatible with it. Therefore if the scientific logic is
indeed non-racial, the folk classification ought to wither under its influence. To adhere to both old and
new is to pick up and put down modern science with shameless promiscuity.”

“The term 'racecraft' highlights the ability of pre- or non-scientific modes of thought to hijack the
minds of the scientifically literate.”

“Nature's real world of irremediably diverse individuality is precisely NOT one that 'observant people
have known about' for centuries. Rather, that world stands open to fresh discoveries about nature in the
make-up of human beings.”

L Craig Venter: 'skin colour as a surrogate for race is a social concept, not a scientific one.'

“Racist concepts do considerable work in political and economic life; BUT, if they were merely an
appendage of politics and economics, without intimate roots in other phases of life, their persuasiveness
would accordingly diminish.”

“Cultural populism enlists voters' self-concept in place of their self-interest; appealing to who they are
and are not, rather than, as economic populism does, to what they require and why.”

“You occupy a valued place if others would miss you when you were gone.”

“The 'welfare mother' can no longer stand for what is not right with America.”

“The term 'race' stands for the conception or the doctrine that nature produced humankind in distinct
groups, each defined by inborn traits that its members share and that differentiate them from the
members of other distinct groups of the same kind but of unequal rank.
“'Racism' refers to the theory and the practice of applying a social civic, or legal double
standard based on ancestry and to the ideology surrounding such a double standard. Racism is not an
emotion or state of mind, such as intolerance, bigotry, hatred, or malevolence. If it were that, it would
easily be overwhelmed; most people mean well, most of the time, and in any case are usually busy
pursuing other purposes. Racism is a social practice, meaning that it is an action and a rationale for an
action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race.
“'Racecraft' refers to mental terrain and to pervasive belief. Like physical terrain, racecraft
exists objectively; it has topographical features hat Americans regularly navigate, and we cannot
readily stop traversing it. Unlike physical terrain, racecraft originates not in nature but in human action
and imagination; it can exist in no other way. The action and imagining are collective yet individual,
day to day yet historical, and consequential even though nested in mundane routine.
“The project: Assume the rationality of those who buy into the race concept and examine the processes
of reasoning that manage to make it plausible.”

“Witchcraft and racecraft are imagined, acted upon, and re-imagined, the action and imagining
inextricably intertwined. The outcome is a belief that 'presents itself to the mind and imagination as a
vivid truth.'”

“Consider the phrase 'some children were segregated in Southern schools because of their [the
children's] skin color.'” How might an American account for the causal mechanism at work in that
phrase?

“Like pure races, witches enter the world, and come to matter therein, not by observation and
experience but by circular reasoning. Neither 'witch' nor 'pure race' has a material existence. Both are
products of thought and of language. Having no material existence, they cannot have material
causation.”

“What they know they know intimately, but not well. Such is the stuff that racecraft is made of. It
occupies a middle ground between science and superstition, an invisible realm of collective
understandings, a half-lit zone of the mind's eye.”

“The ideas of racecraft do not exist purely in the mind, or in only one mind. they are social facts – like
six o'clock, both an idea and a reality. Because racecraft exists in this way, its constant remaking
constantly retreats from view. This 'now you see it, now you don't' quality is what makes racism – the
practice of a double standard based on ancestry – possible.”

“To spectators deceived by the trick [of racecraft], segregation seemed to be a property of black people,
not something white people imposed on them.”

“Everyone has skin color, but not everyone's skin color counts as race, let alone as evidence of criminal
conduct. The missing step between someone's physical appearance and an invidious outcome is the
practice of a double standard: in a word, racism.”

“Racism does not require racists. It only requires racecraft.”

“Rules designed to promote feelings of inferiority and superiority travel in tandem with expectations of
deference and with rituals that simultaneously create and express the requisite feelings.”

“The everyday routines that organize racism do not always, but always can, explode.”

“The sumptuary code shades into the peculiar American predicament of having multiple class
resentments but no legitimate language for talking about class. In that setup, the question 'Why food
stamps?' has two stock answers, depending on the ancestry of the person using them: fecklessness, or
bad luck, plant-closing, and the like.”

“Through the transforming power of racecraft, an individual becomes a race.”

“'Genetic'” is not equivalent to 'racial' or 'ethnic'.

“Consistent application of the 'free-marketplace of ideas' principle today would restore to bio-racism
and eugenics the respectability they once enjoyed – including the 'science' of inferior whites. Instead,
'inferior white races' vanished from the lexicon of bio-racism, to rematerialize outside its purview as
'ethnic' groups. The 'shiftless, ignorant, and worthless' white people vanished altogether. No one
attributes to political correctness the demise of bio-racism as applied to white persons. So the free-
marketplace of ideas apologia for bio-racism as applied to black persons turns out to be the practice of
a double standard.”

From an obituary of Frederick Douglass:

“It might not be reasonable, perhaps, to intimate that his white blood may have something to do
with the remarkable energy he displayed and the superior intelligence he manifested. Indeed, it might
not be altogether unreasonable to ask whether, with more white blood, he would not have been an even
better and greater man than he was, and whether the fact that he had black blood may not have cost the
world a genius, and be, in consequence, a cause for lamentation instead of a source of lyrical
enthusiasm over African possibilities. It is always more or less foolish to credit or discredit a race with
the doings, good or bad, of a particular member of that race, but if it must be done, plain justice should
see to it that the right face gets the glory or the humiliation.”
If anyone seeks a monument to racecraft, gaze at that one.

“In everyday doing, visible things like segregated markets come into view as things done and
imagined, and yet are thought of as having natural causes. It is as though the rules and rituals of
segregation are sufficient to make race visible, but not sufficient to make it real.”

“When nature made room for human society, human beings made room for nature in society. And blood
made in society by human beings has properties that nature knows nothing about. it can consecrate and
purify; it can also profane and pollute. It can define a community and police the borders thereof.
Natural blood never does that sort of thing: it only sustains biological functioning. If it is to perform
metaphorical tasks, human beings must carry out those tasks on its behalf.”

Racecraft is largely “words, verbal habits.”

“Only as metaphor may one speak of 'black genes' and 'white genes' or of 'white' and 'black' blood.”

“White” and “black” are metaphors that exist only to serve the political purpose of rationalizing the
subjugation of those forced into the latter category.

“The thought-structure of racecraft readily dispenses with material causality.”

“Set aside the medical nonsense and notice the wide-awake shrewdness applied to repackaging the stuff
of nightmares. This purposefully encoded, politically deployed racecraft serves as a reminder that what
depends on imagination and action is more flexible than nature, and has the power to create a quasi-
nature more convincing than nature itself.”

“Americans observe themselves and each other through their own eyes and those of others, all the
while classifying and evaluating. Thus racecraft has an inner horizon that turns out to be densely
populated with sometimes peculiarly selected physical traits.”
DOES RACE EXIST?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/

https://adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2016/11/26/race-genetics-and-taboo/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/race/

SEP on Does Race Exist?

Concept of race signifies a division of humanity into a small number of groups based on five criteria:

1 Races reflect some type of biological or essentialist foundation.

2 This foundation generates discrete racial groupings, such that all and only all members of one race
share a set of biological characteristics.

3 This biological foundation is inherited, allowing observers to identify a person's race through her
ancestry or genealogy.

4 Genealogical investigation should identify each race's geographic origin, typically in Africa, Europe,
Asia, or N and S America.

5 This inherited racial biological foundation manifests itself primarily in physical phenotypes, e.g. skin
color, eye shape, hair texture, bone structure, and perhaps also behavioral phenotype, e.g. intelligence
or delinquency.

Many deny the logical coherence of this concept and the very existence of races. Others defend it,
albeit with substantial changes to the foundations of racial identity, which they depict as either socially
constructed or, if biologically grounded, neither discrete nor essentialist.

Some scholars suggest that race is inconceivable without racialized social hierarchies, while others
argue that egalitarian race relations are possible.

IDENTITY POLITICS

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-nationalists-delusion/546356/

“Had racism been toxic to the American electorate, Trump's candidacy would not have been viable.”

Steven Pinker on science and political correctness:

https://juliagalef.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/steven-pinker-panel-remarks-nov-2017.pdf