Wicked raaacceeeecraft
I know it *should beee* strictly tabooo.. but your heart says "Yes, indeed" in you...
Abandon all dope(ynes)s, ye who enter here!
(Per the About page, I’ll be gathering my public twitter threads and reproducing them as free posts - paid subscriptions will be available for some private content and to those who feel “moved” by a spirit of something to contribute something in the way of something like a gratuity.)
For the Opening Day thread, I tried to give a “racecraft for dummies”* explainer, and as a step toward “dismantling” racecraft, to suggest some alternative language for “white” and “black” which would be politically correct by virtue of being actually correct, precisely descriptive of what’s hidden by racecraft’s mystifying terms. On Twitter, Thomas Chatterton Williams has cited more than once Albert Murray from The Omni-Americans, on the truth behind our racial categories: “The United States is not a nation of black and white people. Any fool can see that white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.”
[* I hate “for dummies” but it’s not worth fretting over a better term now. for amateurs, for beginners, for normies, for the curious…]
The term comes from a book by Barbara and Karen Fields titled "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life." IIRC the authors are sisters (IRC), a historian and sociologist (respectively), and academics, so the argument itself can be the usual tough sledding. But the core claim is intuitive, I think, and some of the examples (of sumptuary codes, and of what Barbara Fields at the CUNY talk with Ta-Nehisi Coates pictured down-thread called a “brouhaha” at a country club swimming pool) are vivid and easily grasped. The Fields’ analogy is of American racial beliefs and practices (I can’t recall if they use the word “ideology”, the academics’ favorite word) to *witchcraft*, a figment of social imagination shaped by our American vocabulary, mental categories, assumptions, and practices. (This is from memory, not perfect.)
In thread, I give consciously long, deliberate run-on replacement terms for “white” and “black” because those words are packed so densely, overdetermined, near-Gordian knots, and to tug at the cord and tease apart what takes up the space of five letters in each case is to untangle forty-five words or more.. (forgive me my bad Twitter grammar in thread, as I forgive those…);
I try to elaborate on how racecraft has distorted conversation and genetics and shapes our fears about the results of genomic inquiry. (The book has a brief section on DNA I’ll excerpt if I do a paid post - iirc the specific finding cited was spurious, but the point it made, that we’re all “racial” chimeras, is broadly true. All mutts, all always already hybridized and (content warning!) always already “miscegenated”);
I sketch how “racial” perceptions of phenotypic trait distributions are made psychologically and culturally active, with examples of how that psychoactive racecraft about some ethnic “white”-assimilated groups (Irish, Jewish, Italian) has faded away;
I also articulate some risks or pitfalls on the way out of the scrap heap of dismantled racecraft, and end - jarringly! - with heavy emphasis on the “reality” of witchcraft, the faulty beliefs propping up a proto-empirical discourse (pseudo-scientific more from ignorance than wishful thinking or low honesty.)
… Enjoy? Comments welcome: I will suffer all fools, annoyers, embryos and idiots, eremites and friars, ignorant armies clashing by night, trolls and ogres, sea lions and reply guys, anons, alts, Blue Checks, Trumpists and wokeists, TERFs and trans, bigots and haters, all the pronouns under God’s sun, anyone who might ask, so long as you provide to others the respect, charity and hospitality I extend to you. I have the ban hammer, I have muting power, I can turn off comments, and I have the verbal facility and empathic insight to roast every last Twitterer, Tweeter and Twit to a delicious crisp! I refrain. Bring all the bad faith you can muster, I’ll meet you.