Black History Month speaker: Is Race Identity?, February 28

Introduction by Dr. Touré Reed:

[…]literary scholars as we did last year, in fact, political scientists and sociologists. I need to stress that we sponsor lectures by scholars who explore the experiences plural of African Americans in no small part because that’s exactly what black historian Carter G. Woodson had in mind when he first proposed and launched, I should say, Negro History Week, in about 98 years ago this month. And now that I’ve said all that, it should be very easy to appreciate how fortunate we are to have Professor Barbara Fields with us this evening. Earning her BA (and you may have figured this out, but Professor Fields, of course, is joining us via zoom) but earning her BA from Harvard and PhD in history from Yale University, Dr. Fields is a professor of history at Columbia University in the great city of New York, where I had the pleasure of working for her as a TA many decades ago. She is the recipient of many prestigious grants, among them, and I wouldn’t dare name them all, the John and Catherine MacArthur Fellowship. She’s the author of many influential books and articles. And once again, I wouldn’t dare try to name them all, but I’ll just give you a couple: Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground; Maryland During the 19th Century; Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America which many of my students have read; Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, which she co-authored with her sister anthropologist, Karen Fields. Also, many of my students have read that too. It should go without saying then that Professor Fields is a leading scholar of American history, broadly, and the study of race in the United States. But I want to take a moment to, to say point blank, that Professor Fields’ work has had a profound impact on me both as a scholar and frankly as a black American who really, really hates racism in all of its forms. To be clear, I felt compelled to invite Professor Fields to discuss race in the United States, because I greatly appreciate the thankless work that she has done to try to complicate if not correct, commonplace, counterproductive, ahistorical understandings of race. And people often enough will say, well, history tells us I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, like nine times out of 10. The sense of history they got was from the History Channel, back when it was the Hitler channel rather than the space alien and lager channel, and something from Schlitz malt liquor. But anyway, reading Professor Fields’ work – It’s true – Reading Professor Field’s work, but also working for her helped to impress upon me the importance of viewing race and racism through the lens of human agency and political economy, which is often something we don’t do, unfortunately, to our detriment. And I should add that Racecraft has had a positive impact on my students, when I have assigned that as well. As her TA, one of the things that really struck a chord with me, which I think she’ll appreciate, was the very strong negative reaction that she had to the phrase, which I’m sure many of you have heard, “and then racism took on a life of its own.” I actually should have used the Patrick Bateman voice, if you know that is when I did that. But again, the phrase that I recall Professor Fields hating oh so much, and appropriately so, was “and then racism took on a life of its own.” It’s a problematic phrase, but I am willing to admit that when I was working for Professor Fields, I don’t think that I fully appreciated the mischief performed by that phrase, and lots and lots of other passive voice formulations. Largely because at 25, or 26, how old I was when I’d worked for her, my own understanding of, and here’s a useful concept, cultural hegemony, was inadequate. And I think sometimes when people say racism took on a life of their own- life of its own- if you’re lucky, what they mean is cultural hegemony. Oftentimes, we’re not so lucky. I can say, by the midterm of the semester that I worked for her as a TA, I got it. And I absolutely appreciated the problem with, and I’m gonna say it again, the phrase, “racism took on a life of its own”. Abracadabra. But I am also today, thanks in part again to the influence of her, even more unnerved by the appeal of similarly problematic mystical metaphors about race, like, “racism is our original sin.” I would be happy if I could go the rest of my life without hearing that, when assuming I lived to be 95 as opposed to 10 minutes from now. But that one would be nice if it would go away. Or “racism is in our DNA”, which is a phrase that would make sense to Nazis if we actually bothered to think about what these things meant. But we don’t, for someone who looks at race through the lens of historical process, or, I don’t know, just appreciate the difference between what culture is in one column and what race is supposed to be in the other. All three of these phrases treat race as a social construct in name only, which creates a lot of problems for us conceptually, I don’t know especially if we want to push back against racism, right? It’s important to identify what it is and what it is not. That said, in tonight’s lecture titled, “Is Race Identity?”, Professor Barbara Fields will enlighten us as only she can about what race is and is not. So, without further ado, I give you Professor Barbra Jean Fields.

[Fields speaks but it muted]

Barbara, if you can hear me you are muted. So, we haven’t heard a word that that you’ve said.

Dr. Barbara Fields:

Oh.

Reed:

There we go.

Fields:

Oh, so you didn’t hear anything?

Reed:

Nothing. Not a thing.

Fields:
Oh, well, I

Reed:

Clean slate though.

Fields:

I expressed my thanks to you for inviting me. And I said “here” even though we’re actually “here and there”. But I also wanted to express my debt to Professor Touré Reed as well as to his father, Professor Adolph Reed, from whom I have learned so much, and much of it you’re going to hear incorporated into the talk that I’m going to give you today. So, thank you very much Touré for your work. And thank you very much for inviting me to deliver this keynote talk for Black History Month, 2024.

Can you hear me all right? Are you able to hear me all right?

Reed:

Yes, you are good.

Fields:

Okay. Okay.

I pose a rhetorical question as the title of this evening’s talk, and that is something I promised myself many years ago never to do again. I reached that resolve because of the debacle that followed my publishing an essay with the title, “Who Freed the Slaves?” In that essay, I laid out how the political dynamics unleashed by secession and war eventuated an emancipation, which neither the union nor the Confederacy had contemplated at the outset. I told the story of how political overreaching by slaveholders help to spread anti-slavery beyond the abolitionists who were very unpopular, to include even persons who oppose slavery on racist grounds. And I told the story of how political agitation and organizing in the north induce the government to bring black men into the army as soldiers. And I talked about how slaves, by escaping to Union Army lines, by enlisting in the Union Army, and by undermining discipline on plantations and farms that the Confederate draft had stripped of able bodied and even not so able-bodied white men, made it impossible for the United States government to stop short of proclaiming emancipation the goal of the war. I expected persons who were following the argument to understand by the end, that the question, “who freed the slaves?” was wrongly posed. Emancipation came about not because of actions taken by one person or even one group of persons, but because a contest over political power ignited a war, whose dynamics eventually resulted in emancipation. But as I should have foreseen, posing my rhetorical question in an open-ended way, tempted people to fill in the blank with their favorite answer, rather than reject the question. The usual answers being either Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves or the slaves freed themselves, with the Lincoln advocates the loudest and most insistent. One lesson that I took to heart after that episode, though, was never again to pose an open-ended rhetorical question as the title. Although tonight’s title “Is Race Identity?” is a rhetorical question that is not open ended. It presupposes an answer of yes or no. I will not make you wait for the answer leaving you to arrive at it by inductive reasoning on the basis of my evidence and arguments. My answer to the question which I will give you right now, is no. Race is not identity.

Before I go any further, I might as well make clear right now that both race and identity are concepts that I have little use for. Most of you know enough about me or think you do – think you do – to be aware that I reject the concept of race. I will come back to race shortly and explain what I mean by adding, “or think you do”.  For now, stating my conviction that nothing in the concept of race as understood in this country can be salvaged, for emancipatory purposes, I propose to deal with identity. Eric H. Erickson, the Danish German American psychoanalyst, who introduced the phrase “identity crisis” into American English, understood identity to be the sense of self, at which an adult individual arrives through the experiences of childhood and adolescence. Ever since I first heard the expression native person decades ago, coined I believe, by the Barbadian novelist George Lambing, I have believed that native person captures Erickson’s notion of identity to a tee. But here’s the point: Native person, identity or whatever you call it, it pertains, by definition, to an individual. Erik Erikson’s studies of how Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi developed develop their adult identities, located that process in their societies, but he envisioned that process as individual, as something that happens one person at a time. But even at the level of an individual identity is a slippery concept. The late Paul Conkin, a distinguished intellectual historian was Tennessee through and through, born and bred in the East Tennessee town of Chuckey, educated in Tennessee at Milligan College in Johnson City, and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and he spent most of his career at Vanderbilt. In his 1997 address as president of the Southern Historical Association, Conkin had this to say about his identity as a southerner, “Sometime” and I’m quoting him, “Sometime probably in high school, I first learned that I am a southerner. No one had told me that as a child. As I learned what characteristics purportedly fit the South, I was not very pleased with my newly discovered identity.” That’s the word he used. “That identity”, according to Conkin “did not seem to fit very well.” In the first place, although Tennessee was a Confederate state, Conkin’s Tennessee ancestors had fought for the Union. And all he knew at firsthand about one party politics, a defining characteristic of the solid white democratic self, was that his home congressional district had not elected a Democrat since 1865, [Oh] nor had he seen cotton growing or tasted hominy grits, other supposed to elements of southern identity. “Moreover,” he recalled “only one black family, now all deceased, lived in or even anywhere near my ru- my rural village.” Nevertheless, he said by accident or geography, he found himself a southerner. But I suggest that what Conkin recounted was neither geography nor identity. Rather, it was identification and identification as Southerner, assigned by persons other than Conkin himself, and talked to him when he was in high school. My guess is that his native person, that is who he was to himself, was indeed southerner. But a Southerner who, even as a lad in high school, would not have identified himself, either with the history or with the attributes that his teachers probably associated with the term Southerner. When I myself address the southern Historical Association as president in 2015, I told how I came to recognize myself as a southerner. It happened to be the first semester of my first year as a graduate student. I was chatting with the late Julie Seville, and she returned from the first meeting of her first class with the historian Stephen Woodward. Woodward habitually introduced members of the class to each other on the first day by reading out the names, attaching a blurb of his own to each one. And when he reached Julie’s name, he announced that she was from Memphis, joking about the way Memphis residents pronounced the name of the city. He said they leave out the second “m”s. “Mephis”. And he identified Julie as one of the southerners in the class, because it was Yale, so southerners were in the minority there, just as they are today, by the way, Columbia. “I guess I am a southerner,” Julie mused, smiling quizzically. When we spoke after the class, that she added, “I never thought of myself as a southerner, until today.”

In common with probably most Afro Americans at the time, Julie and I both understood Southerner to refer to a white person that was a segregationist and a racist. But she, and I had the example of our teacher Steven Woodward before us as proof, not that we needed it, that a person might be white and from the south, and yet neither a segregationist nor a racist. That moment crystallized for me that it was actually because of the civil rights movement, that Julie and I, along with millions of other Afro Americans, could think of ourselves as Southerners. And that, by the way, is why my gorge rises when smug progressives on newspaper comment boards react to news of the latest enormity committed by right wing judges, school boards, pastors, governors, senators, senators and members of Congress from the south by saying, “Oh, well, just let the southern states proceed”. Or by telling people living in those states who may be opposed to those actions, “Well, why don’t you just move to a blue state?” Nobody’s native person, or identity is of a single piece. All of us combine multiple elements, some overlapping, some conflicting. Which element takes precedent depends on the time and the circumstances. Another fact that makes the concept of identity slippery – Michael R. West, a historian and former student of mine, who now teaches at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, demonstrates that fact that his students at the beginning of every semester. He passes out small cards on which he asked students to write their names and tell who they are. He hangs on to the cards, but he doesn’t say anything about them until perhaps weeks later. Some student in the class prefaces a question with “speaking as a white person” or some such formula, and then he interrupts at once and deadpan with the announcement, “But there are no white people in this class”. A statement that contradicts the clear evidence of the students’ eyes, since most of them are white. And therefore, the statement leaves them dumbfounded. Then he pulls out the card of the student who’s just spoken and remarks. “Well, you wrote here that you’re a football player”, or English major fencer, a member of the drama society, whatever. And then he adds, “You didn’t say anything about being white.” A hush then falls on the room. I cannot and I suspect Michael West cannot determine exactly what lesson the students take from that moment. Perhaps they’re simply befuddled, but I am certain that no one in the class ever forgets that moment, but rather, that will be coming back to them for years.

Anybody’s native person consists of multiple elements which overlap, and may even at times contradict one another: football player, history major, cellist, motorcycle racer, Drama Club member, BLM demonstrator, white person. One person could be all those things. Why not? Can there be such a thing as mistaken identity? Sort of it’s a common phrase, is it not? But can there be such a thing? Short of psychosis probably not, despite the phrase being commonplace, but there certainly can be such a thing as mistaken identification. Because however you identify yourself, others may identify you differently. Circumstances determine whose identification prevails and with what consequences. A divergence of-of identifications ended in the death of two Afro American police officers. In January of 2008, police officers- white police officers- in White Plains New York, shot and killed Christopher Ridley, an off duty Afro American police officer, while Ridley was wrestling a suspect who had just assaulted and wounded somebody. The following year, New York City police officers shot and killed Omar Edwards, an off duty Afro American officer who was engaged in chasing a car theft suspect. In both instances, white officers took a black officer for criminal. A mistaken identification by the white officers overruled the self-identification that is the identity of the black officers, that identity being at the moment of their killing. Police officer responding to a crime in progress. Whether you call it mistaken identity or mistaken identification, it is a possibility that is inseparable from the notion of identity. Not every mistaken identification ends in death, of course, though a surprising number have subjected the victims of such mistakes to jail, prison or involuntary mental confinement for varying periods of time. Most mis-identifications probably end in confusion or misunderstanding that the participants may never even become aware of. If that level of confusion can be set, an individual navigating his or her identity or sense of self. What happens then? When identity becomes willy nilly and without further thought collective. The short answer is what happens is a mess. Profound as are the complexities of identity at the level of the individual. They are trivial compared to the complexities besetting any attempt to apply to collective phenomena, a term that was invented to explain the psychology of an individual. That mess was on full display in an article that appeared recently in the New York Times under the headline, “No box to check when the census doesn’t reflect you”. The “no box to check problem”, assuming you accept that not having an identity box to check is a problem, arises from a 1997 federal guideline that defines “white” as anyone with origins in Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East, with Lebanese and Egyptian, offered in the 2020 census as examples with a white box on the race question. The other categories according to the article are black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and a variety of Asian ancestries. The article, which was based on a survey that the Times conducted, starting in 2022, in order to quote learn more about those of Middle Eastern and North African descent in the United States. That article reflects a hapless though no doubt well meant effort to do the impossible, to manufacture a collective identity out of dozens of individuals self identifications. The collective identity already has an acronym, MENA, standing for Middle Eastern and North African. And it will soon, by 2030, be coming to a census near you. Interviews with people who responded to the New York Times survey revealed the variety of ways that the respondents characterize their preferred affiliation, as well as the reasons – as well as their reasons – for their preferences, illustrated in the process showed up. How fatuous was the proposed collective MENA identity? Start with Amina Syed Quieetria [?] I’m not sure I’m pronouncing her name correctly, who identified herself as Algerian and North African. And then explained “I’m African, but I feel that checking the Black or African American box is wrong. My ancestors did not struggle through slavery or racism. My skin color does not make me a target of racism. But I’m not white.”

Another, Sambara Hoddie identified herself as Yemeni American, adding that quote, “The categories don’t speak to my identity as Arab or more specifically, Yemenia. I don’t walk through this world as a white person. I don’t get those privileges as a white person. I don’t have white culture.” Faisal Ali, who identified himself as Somali, an Arab, declared, quote, “You come to the US and if you’re dark skinned, then you’re black. But there’s nothing in Somali that’s black or white. Sometimes I choose other and sometimes I choose African American.” Joseph Hallak, age 80, one of the oldest of the interviewees characterized himself as Syrian American while adding quote, “Given the choices, I would always say white, but there are a whole bunch of qualities associated with that, that don’t capture me, my identity, my background and my experience.” Ceylon Swenson added another identity acronym to the soup, identifying herself as white and mix SWANA, S-W-A-N-A, SouthWest Asian and North African. She reasoned, “If I look at myself, I’m not Hijabi, I’m not Muslim, and I know I go around the world with white woman privilege.” The interviewees responses reminded me of a similar history that unfolded back in the 1970s, when Hispanic was just starting to congeal as a catch all for persons of Latin American origin or ancestry, including those whose mother tongue was not Spanish. The Brazilian novelist Georgia Amado had to mark himself Hispanic when applying for social security number during his stay in the United States. The designation Hispanic belonged to the choreography of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which involves carving up the electorate into ethnic blocks and appealing to their identities as a tactic to offset the newly unleashed political potential of black Southerners as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. A number of persons in California, indignant at their compulsory recruitment into the concocted identity Hispanic, instead insisted on being identified by their actual country of origin. The New York Times reporters and the experts they consulted expatiated on the need for, significance of, as well as potential risks of the proposed proposed new MENA, M-E-N-A, census category. One rationale was that persons of MENA descent could not be assured of fair representation in the drawing of congressional districts, as long as they quote “Don’t exist in the data used to draw the lines”. Another was that access to quote “more granular data” would permit medical researchers to better detect elevated health risks for certain groups because the identity designation, quote, “is crucial to securing funding for studies” – funding the mother of identity. For years, the Census Bureau and other statistics gathering government agencies maintain the fiction of a distinction between the categories, race and ethnicity, insisting, for example, that Hispanic, unlike white, Black, Native American, or Native Hawaiian, and a number of Asian ancestries is an ethnicity, not a race. But that did not stop the Veterans Affairs Department from awarding funding -that magic word again- for research that quote “involves testing to identify genetic tendencies and illnesses and disorders among Hispanics”. The boondoggle came to an end when a whistleblower reported that the researchers had in violation of the rules driven a government vehicle across the US Mexico border, in order to take blood samples and interview subjects for a, quote, “Latino genetics study”. It’s in our DNA. The new MENA category, if adopted, will drop the pretense by offering a combined race or ethnicity box for respondents to check.

And that brings me back to race and to the promised explanation of what I meant when I suggested that you may only think you know what I think about race as a category, because many people believe mistakenly that I argue that race is a social construction. But I would never waste my time on such a meaningless argument. Sometimes I taught my students my German Shepherd knew that he couldn’t even read. The United States of America, after all, is a social construction. Illinois State University is a social construction. The evil eye is a social construction, and the Labradoodle is a social construction. Knowing that they are all social constructions, however, will not help anyone to understand how they came to be or how they differ from one another. What I do argue is that race is a meaningful concept only in the sense in which population geneticists use it. For them race is a set of statistical generalizations about a defined population. That while accurate in the aggregate does not apply to any particular individual within that population. That is to say, in other words, that it is an imaginary entity like the equator, or the Prime Meridian, or like median national income. A statistical generalization that, while offering an accurate description of the income of persons living in a country taken in the aggregate, does not describe any particular individual in that country. That, however, is far from how the public understands race, including some of the most highly educated members of the public. The fact that I came to understand through recent exchanges with a medical doctor at Harvard Medical School, who was trying to teach colleagues in Transfusion Medicine, that a patient’s blood characteristics are individual and not racial. In fact, a dead giveaway that somebody despite mouthing the formula “race is a social construction”, accepts race as fact, rather than a social construction is if that person uses racial as an adjective, making nonsense of whatever follows. The terms racial profiling, and racial discrimination imply that the victims race rather than the aggressors racist act produce the outcome. And I will not even try to parse the current fad racial capitalism in an effort to figure out what could possibly be met by such a mix buffet of terms that are not conventional.

Frederick Douglass, the Maryland born fugitive slave turned abolitionists politician was a child of only seven or eight, when he first recognized the emptiness of the concept of race. That was the age at which he began pondering why he had been born a slave. “Why am I a slave?” He wondered, “Why are some people slaves and others masters?” And then he added to his musings, apparently being something of a historian in the bud even at that tender age. “Was there ever a time when this was not so? How did the relation commence?” He quickly dismissed the answer he got from playmates to whom he put those questions. Their answer was “God up in the sky made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves”. Douglas knew that that could not be true, because not all the black people around him were slaves, and not all the white people around him were slave owners. In fact, nearly half the black people in Maryland by 1860 were free, and only one Maryland household in six owned slaves.

Casting further doubt on his playmate’s explanation, Douglas knew people in the neighborhood who looked white, but were slaves nevertheless. So even as a child, Douglas reason that being black, blackness, if you fancy that metaphysical construct, resurrected from the 1970s could not account for enslavement. Even when costumed as color, the notion of race did not fool young Frederick Douglass. He couched the revelation at which he finally arrived in a memorable atheism, quote, “Not color, but crime; not God, but man” was the true why of slavery. And the budding historian again as well as the budding abolitionist, Douglas drew the triumphant conclusion quote, “What man can make, man can unmake.” Douglas may have been precocious to have couched his reasoning about slavery in such lucid and logical and articulate terms when he was only a child, but the observations that led to his reasoning and the conclusions that he drew from them would have been available to slaves less adept than he in phrasing them articulately. In other words, you did not have to be a Douglass to figure that out. During the era of the American Revolution, racist ideology, by which term I understand acceptance of a political, social or legal double standard, based on perceived or ascribed ancestry, racist ideology, explained to the satisfaction of European American political thinkers and leaders, but not to rank and file Afro Americans, why persons of African descent were an exception to the general rule of freedom.

Afro Americans did not need and therefore did not develop an explanation for enslavement based on their African ancestry. That is to say, Afro Americans did not develop a theory of race. In petitions for freedom, that they address the state legislatures, they base their claim on natural rights, understood as belonging to them, the same as to everyone else. White Americans might need racist ideology to resolve the contradiction between slavery and freedom. But Afro Americans resolve the contradiction more simply by demanding the abolition of slavery. Once Douglass had reached young adulthood and escaped from Maryland, the obvious, the answer to the obvious next question, “What to do about slavery?” flowed directly from the conclusion that he had reached as a child political action. And Douglass thus became not an afro pessimist, or an abolitionist. Douglass understood race as a provably false explanation of why persons of African descent were slaves in the midst of a polity, where most people took freedom for granted. In other words, he understood race not as effect, and certainly not as his identity, but as a hostile identification imposed by others as a rationalization- of inflate -of enslavement. I didn’t say justification either, I said rationalization. Douglass’s arrival at that conclusion as a child of seven or eight leads me to wonder why the expression “racial identity” today does not strike most people as a contradiction in terms, which is what it is. After all, race, and identity are polar opposites. Whereas Erickson’s notion of identity is individual by definition, race is collective by presumption. When you combine the two, they reach an apogee of intellectual incoherence. Race is the antithesis of identity, bearing the same relationship to an individual sense of self that a brand seared into a bull’s hide bears to the bull’s sense of themselves.

Why does it matter? If logic were the only thing at stake, then the concept of racial identity could perhaps be dismissed as a curiosity. But since a good many persons take it seriously, it is clearly more than that. If it is a curiosity at all, it’s certainly a curiosity that does harm. When the notion of racial identity infiltrates the political arena, it becomes a solvent of politics. It becomes a solvent of politics in the first place by encouraging the fallacy of a collective interest that people share purely by reason, a shared ancestry. I, for example, am not aware of any interest that I hold in common with Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, let alone any political, judicial, or religious conviction. But the siren song of collective racial identity for ears attuned to it, and minds distracted by it, contempt people to imagine a natural affinity with or allied a well-founded antipathy toward someone who quote, “looks like them”. It also lends spurious credence to disparity thinking. The idea that the highest political good will have been achieved when every group, however that group is specified, suffers injustice in proportion to its percentage of the population. By that reasoning, if the percentage of unarmed Afro or indigenous Americans killed by police matches their percentage of the total population, and the percentage of unarmed white Americans killed by the police matches their percentage of the population, then justice has been achieved. And correlatively, justice and injustice can be defined in no other terms.

An egregious example of such thinking comes from the UK. I wish I could think that it couldn’t happen here, but I dare not. Teachers in London, called in police officers to stretch- strip search – a 15 year old black school child to the extent of requiring her to bend over and spread her buttocks, and this was during her menstrual period, because they smelled marijuana in her vicinity when she was coming into the school, but they could not find any marijuana after searching her handbag and her backpack. I gather that some of the officers involved have since been brought up on disciplinary charges. But the only question raised in the immediate aftermath was whether the same thing would have been done if the child had been white. Because if the same thing would have been done, then it wasn’t racism. And presumably then it wasn’t to be taken that seriously. The question, in other words was whether it was racist or not whether it was wrong. As I say, Well, I would like to think that there’s no jurisdiction in this country was such a thing could be done, and the issues subsequently framed in those terms. I don’t, I don’t think that’s right. I hope you notice that I added, however, the group is specified, while discussing the idea that the highest political good will have been achieved when every group suffers injustice in proportion to its percentage of the population. If you did, then you spotted a connection with the discussion about MENA census category, Middle East and North African census category. Once there is an official census category, straddling the categories of race and ethnicity, then there’s another axis along which to vacate weighing injustice in favor of countering disparities. The notion of what which is part of the argument going on among all those people who whom I quoted about their MENA identities. The notion of collective identities bears, furthermore, on a crucial aspect of politics, namely, the staking of claims for social goods, be the material resources, or abstractions, such as justice and equality. The question being who has the standing to stake such claims in whose name and on whose behalf. How quickly collective identities can remove such questions from the realm of politics, to that a horse trading is obvious. A form of forced trading, moreover, in which those with suitable political connections and enough wealth, assume the prerogative of trading the horses on behalf of the rest of us. Persons who supposedly encompassed within the collective identity, have forfeited the ability to trade horses on our own behalf, because there’s somebody some oligarchy who’s doing it on our behalf. Perhaps the most important way that the notion of a collective racial identity becomes a solvent of emancipatory politics is that it smothers the development of forms of solidarity that unlike racial identity, actually hold promise of being politically effective. And this is where professor Touré’s work is very important. I have heard people argue that racial identity is a real entity rather than a contradiction in terms, and that it has value as a technique of mobilization. Persons making that argument usually cite the massive national and international demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020. But the argument is self-refuting. Far too many people of varying ancestry took part in those demonstrations to suggest that share of ancestry was what mobilized them. Moreover, I doubt that even for black people who took part, shared color or ancestry was a more important motivator than the facts and circumstances of Floyd’s murder. In any case, there is a difference between mobilization and effective politics between turning out large numbers of people to demonstrate and getting something – change. Mobilization in 2020, has not prevented the killing of unarmed persons not limited to black persons, by the way, by aggressive trigger happy or sadistic police officers. Only effective political action can do that. The effect of political action requires collaboration among all those who have a stake in loosening the halt of the oligarchic rule that shortens our lifespans, threatens the education of our young people, degrades our environment, and condemns an ever-growing number to homelessness and helplessness, regardless of their ancestry.  By camouflaging relations of class power, in a racial disguise, the illusion of racial identity, forecloses that possibility. “What man can make, man can unmake,” Frederick Douglass declared. It is high time, surely, for us to get started on the unmaking. Thank you.

Reed:

That was great. Thank you. We have time for questions. I’m, One, there’s a mic right there in the middle; Two, while we wait, I’ll ask you a question, because I’m behind a hot mic. So, there you go. Membership has its privileges. So, the question that I want to put to you, Professor Fields, is, in part related to your point about disparities and how focus on disparities can set the bar too low. And I don’t know that since a lot of students here, I’ll give you an example. So, there’s an interest today and disparities as it pertains to higher education. So that should be relevant to all of you. And we can point to the fact that Blacks take out student loans at a higher rate than Whites, right. And I think some, like 86% of Black Americans take out student loans or something like that, right. And in a disparitarian vision of equality and just society, then what you’d have is an equal distribution of student loans among Blacks and Whites, right? That would make sense. So we’d be in a just society, if the percentage of black Americans who took out student loans was equal to the percentage of Whites, but the problem is about 70% of White Americans take out student loans, too. So, you got you would then go from about 86% for Blacks, if we equal that with whites, to 70%. All right? Which means that the vast majority of Black Americans would be taking out student loans, and that would suck in the grand scheme. It’d be better, but it wouldn’t be good. So, does that makes sense? Collectively? Are you guys picking up what I’m putting down? Cool. So having said that, picking up on this disparitarian framework, I know partly from my time working from you, but also my own experiencing experience professing, as I like to say, that for those of us who insist that race is an imaginary construct, that it’s not really so much a biological category, but it announces a political standing, right. And as a project that functions to treat as natural inequalities that are the product of social relations, that we are often accused of imagining that racism is a thing of the past. That frame is often conflated with post racialism, let’s say. It’s funny, it’s not my case.  I actually make an explicit argument against post racialism, and yet I’ve certainly been accused of that very case. So here’s the question. There’s a lot of wind up for not a lot of pitch. And I will admit to that, so the actual question that’s baked into that:  if race is imaginary, does that mean that racism doesn’t exist? It’s real basic question, I think, because that’s how people hear the point. So did you get that? So if race is an imaginary set of categories, does that mean that there’s no such thing as racism?

Fields:

Well, I obviously know that you are framing this question as devil’s advocate, because I know you don’t subscribe to that. And in case there are people in the audience who do subscribe to that, let me, let me just offer, first of all, for you an analogy. Does the burning of people at the stake on accusations of witchcraft, mean that witchcraft is real? If we can understand that, burning witches at the stake proves persecution, it doesn’t prove witchcraft to be real, then we should not be stopped by an argument that you can’t have racism unless you have race. But then I think it may be that Americans tend to operate on a definition of racism that doesn’t really get at, at what it’s about. The definition that I apply, and I have to say that I was heavily influenced in this many years ago by one of your fellow students Touré, I think you and Michael West actually coincided for a time or overlapped in graduate program,

Reed:

About 20 literally,

Fields:

Sorry?

Reed:

About 20 minutes, he was on his way out as I was walking in.

Fields:

So, you didn’t actually get to know Him? In any case, Michael West is the one who crystallized it, and in a formulation that has stuck with me ever since that racism, if you want to define it, is a double standard. It’s acting on a double standard based on a double standard in social, juridical, economic terms, that is based on presumed ancestry. So, if that is what racism is, you don’t need for race to be real, in order to have people acting on a double standard on the basis of something that they perceive or suppose or have been told. We have to distinguish between the action and the belief. And this seems to be something very hard for, for many Americans to do. But it’s essential in understanding what can and cannot be comprehended in the notion of racism, that you grasp that race doesn’t have to be real for people to act on a double standard based on people’s African ancestry. And I doubt that you can have a genuinely emancipatory politics concerning this subject if you don’t start from that kind of understanding.

Reed:

Thank you – make sense to me. Questions from the audience. Again, there’s a mic there. Professor Fields will be able to hear you just fine. Go for it. Would you say your name and your affiliation with ISU if you’ve asked questions?

Uh oh.  We’re having a mic problem. You can use mine.

Fields:

Oh, I thought it was my mic problem.

Reed:

Now does it work?

Q1:

Check check, check.

Reed:

There we go. Perfect.

Q1 by Steven Lazaroff:

Excellent. Hello. I’m Steven Lazaroff, a fourth year PhD student in the English department here at ISU. Thank you, so much Professor Fields and as well as Professor Reed.   I kind of have a small question and then a bigger one. One was, I’m, I work with Thomas Jefferson’s notes on the state of Virginia a lot. And I’m kind of curious, like, I guess who you think is like largely responsible for the common sense idea that skin color is race? And then a different question about racial capitalism. And is it a similar problem? Like a follow through with the emptiness of race is a social construct, like you were talking about. Because I’m thinking of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s, thought about, what does she say? There’s not a second of capitalism that isn’t racial. And I guess I kind of heard not an emptiness in that, but in something similar maybe in that. So it’s kind of curious. Thank you.

Fields:

Okay, repeat the first one. The first question,

Reed:

Who is responsible for the notion – the equation of skin color?

Fields:

Oh, yeah, I certainly think that Thomas Jefferson is, is the one who pioneered it in American letters. But, you know, in the process of pioneering that notion of black people being a separate race, Jefferson also contradicted that fact. You know, he went to a lot of trouble saying there’s a difference between African people and White people there and then they were they were things that should have been self-evidently ridiculous to a scientist, like their griefs are transient, they secrete less through the kidney, that sort of thing, that he didn’t even think he needed to subject to experimental examination and proof or disproof. So, he went through all of that, but then he got to a question. And remember, Notes on the State of Virginia was a response to a questionnaire that was circulated to all the members of the Continental Congress by a Frenchman at a time when the French were contemplating their future as allies of, of the United States.

And the question was, what can you say about the, how did he put it? About the modes of, of America, but Jefferson understood it to be Virginia. It was something very general, about the customs, I think that’s the word he used. And it could have been understood to be a question about how people dressed, rules of hospitality, rules of etiquette. Jefferson chose to interpret that as a question about slavery. And so out of nowhere, he announced that slavery is the exercise of despotism by one people, one people against another. That it makes it, that destroys the patriotism. It allows one half of the citizens to destroy the patriotism of the other half. Now, most of you, if you if your history students, you know, that the Supreme Court did not consider black people to be citizens of the United States until the 14th amendment. I mean, under the Constitution, they were not according to the Supreme Court, they were not even citizens. Here’s Jefferson, referring to the slaves as citizens whose owners have destroyed their, he put “amor patriae”, their patriotism. So, Jefferson is both the eloquent voice and elaborator of racism in in early America, and a person who recognized, perhaps against his own conscious will, that the logic of racism didn’t work. Because after he went to such lengths to establish black people are different, then he suddenly turned around and said they are citizens, who are, whom their owners are despots over. And he suggested that that would be a corruption to the Republic. So, yes, originator of, or at least, a elaborator of racism, but also one who recognizes the fatuousness of arguments for their being a basis for slavery other than injustice. Now, Jefferson was so disturbed by this, that for the first and only time in all of his writings, he said it was a problem that would have to be solved by the Almighty. And Jefferson did not, Jefferson was a Deist. He didn’t believe in a God who interferes in human affairs, but he said the only way we’re going to solve this one is by divine interference. And I think the reason for that is that Jefferson had in his mind two things that both of which he was committed to, but which were at war with each other. And the first was that slavery was necessary for the construction of the, of the new nation that he was part of building. That was one, but the counterpart was slavery is going to be the destruction of this nation. Because the sovereignty of the owners is going to destroy the sovereignty of the country. So yeah, originator in a double sense that I think many people don’t recognize. I once replied in the comment board of the Washington Post, I do that sometimes because something happens to my good sense. And I don’t even remember what it was – some article probably about people imposing their religious codes on other people. So, I quoted Jefferson, who said that impositions of religious codes have the effect of making one half the people fools and the other half hypocrites. And somebody commented on my comment by identifying me as a white male, because I quoted Jefferson. So, you know, there you have it, people don’t even understand enough about either Jefferson or American history, to be able to see all the contradictory parts that made up that, especially Jefferson’s moment, of both defending and opposing slavery.

The second question, you’d have to remind me,

Reed:

So that was about racial capitalism, and I think the short answer is, what’s your beef with it?

Fields:

My beef with it is that borrowing a phrase that Marx once used, racial capitalism is like yellow logarithm. The two terms don’t even go together. What could possibly be meant? Well, I, as I said in the talk, as soon as you turn race into an adjective, and put it together with a noun, you make nonsense of the noun. Racial discrimination, as I said, you know, if you say it’s discrimination on the basis of race, what you’re saying is that the target of discrimination is the cause of it, because the target exudes the race, that that leads to the discrimination. What can you mean then, if you apply, if you turn that into that adjective, into a description of capitalism? I just, I don’t think it means anything. That’s my beef with it. It has nothing to do with how capitalism arises. Historically, it has nothing to do with how capitalism works. I understand that for some people the contribution that slavery made to the development of English and American and other capitalisms is enough for them to call it racial capitalism. But I don’t think, first of all, slavery is not the same as race, though Americans treat them as though they are. I remember when I was being interviewed by Ken Burns for the Civil War documentary, the way he would wave his hand over a mention of slavery and refer to it as race. It’s like Professor Reed’s speaking of original sin, you know that it’s also a way people talk about slavery. But slavery is not theological, which sin is, and slavery is not racial. If we can’t establish that race is something real, then how can we establish that whatever that we assume that to be, has something that that has to do with capitalism? I think it’s, it’s a fad, it certainly is a fad, racial capitalism, and I think people have adopted it, because it makes them feel as though they’re taking a stand about racism in in this country. But capitalism, if you want to define it, is a system in which all of the major factors that go into production are commodities, that is, they are items that are freely available for sale and purchase. And that means that the raw material, the tools, the land, these are all commodities available for sale. But crucially, it also requires that labor power is a commodity available for sale and purchased freely. Now, that can’t be true of slavery, can it? Because the labor power of slaves is not separable from their persons. The owners of slaves actually hold their slaves as their capital. Whereas people who are true capitalists don’t own their labor force. In fact, it’s part of the flexibility of capitalism, that the owners have no stake in it in the people who work their factories.  If a slave owner’s slave dies, he’s lost a bit of his capital. If a capitalist factory owner’s employee dies, it’s no skin off his nose. That’s how capitalism operates. And there’s nothing in, there’s no space in that explanation that needs an imaginary conception of race to make it complete. Now, I know I know that racial capitalism is a dogma that has pretty much taken over the economy. But I think it has done so mainly because people don’t think very clearly about it. They don’t invest actual thought in it, because it seems to go without saying it’s part of the air, it’s part of the atmosphere. Or maybe I should just quote, I think the saying was attributed to a science fiction writer, that the two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.

Reed:

Any other questions from the audience? I’m surprised my colleague Stuart Winger didn’t have any questions.

But Ron Gifford!

Q2 Ron Gifford:

I’ll ask a question. Ron Gifford in the history department. Thank you very much for focusing on abolition. I like it when people highlight Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist in general,

Fields:

After all, it is Black History Month and Douglass was born in February.

Q2:

Absolutely.  But ultimately, I guess the question I have I’d like you to address is so many people see this problem as insurmountable. And you mentioned Frederick Douglass, what can be made can be unmade? To what degree is this going to require a movement in which people disagree with one another about race or about gender or about all of these other things that divided abolitionists into different categories that unified them in the quest to battle that evil that they perceive slavery to be.

Fields:

This is a question that I think is well answered in, in Touré’s book, Toward Equality. Because the accomplishments in the past, especially in the era of the New Deal, and immediately after, and in the era of the civil rights movement came about because people were able to collaborate with each other on one thing, who didn’t necessarily agree with each other on a whole lot of other things. In fact, I would, I would say that much of the disappointment and disillusionment that came in the wake of the civil rights movement actually arose from a misunderstanding of what was and what was not part of a of a of a political consensus among the group of people who were activists. I don’t mean consensus across the country. That is to say that they did not agree with each other on everything. Some of them, for example, had very strong, Cold War, anti-communist convictions that set them at odds with other people who were passionate advocates for getting rid of the racist appendages from the past. And those disagreements were not very far below the surface. But for a time, and in a limited area, it was possible to, to cooperate. And I think that is partly, it’s a skill, a political skill that we don’t have, because there’s been such a long period of demobilization. I think it has something to do with the fact that we have not had an act and still don’t have a very active and effective labor movement, at least in comparison to other, to European Union nations, for example. And, in fact, we have and have had since the 1950s, we have had a legal apparatus that is actively hostile toward unions and union power. And so that means that the basis on which people can engage in political actions without agreeing on religion and all kinds of other things, a large part of that basis is missing here because we don’t have the the last 40 or 50 years of a strong labor movement. I would like to think, I don’t know if it’s true but I hope, that there may be beginning signs of such a thing recovering. Because I know that if it doesn’t happen, we’re sunk. Because we will not have the kind of change that could actually improve things if there is not a political movement opposing the levels which are really obscene of inequality that prevail in this country. And for that to happen, we have to, people have to break away from the the discourse that is hegemonic in this country. And as I always explained to my students, you can’t lift something while you’re standing on it. And the ideology that supports economic and political inequality in this country is an ideology that we’re standing on, while a few are trying to lift it. And it’s because, just to give you an example of, of what that that ideology does, just look at the way we discuss affirmative action in higher education, as though admitting a few people to a handful of ivy league schools is going to do something about inequality in this country. This is a way of legitimizing it, rather than ending it. But that is not the impression that you, that you get, if you’re breathing the ether. If you’re living in the air of this country, you can imagine that affirmative action is a basic way to to make a dent in inequality. It absolutely is not. It’s like race relations and race relations, a way of managing inequality. And that is so deeply ingrained that it’s going to be very hard to dislodge. I get angry, well, not angry, because I know I know where it comes from. But it really disturbs me to hear all of the self-righteousness that comes to the surface when anyone’s talking about affirmative action in higher education. Because first it, it reflects the fact that people don’t even know what affirmative action did and didn’t do, when it’s still, before the courts essentially outlawed it. And at the same time, it is based on illusions about how much you can do by tinkering with higher education, even as a whole, but especially higher education, in the form of a few so called elite schools. If you want to do something about inequality, there has to be something done about the the way education is paid for starting down at the elementary school level. And if that’s not on the table, then making inroads against inequality is not on the table. So that’s the problem. Yes, people can unmake these things, but they can’t do it by blowing smoke. They can’t do it by rhetorical formulations. And they can’t do it without very costly struggle.

Reed:

Two quick things before my dapper colleague, Stuart Winger takes it, takes it away. One is to your point about race relations. A couple of years ago, we brought out sociologist Zine Magubane, to discuss that very issue. And she was fantastic. The second is that the point that I made about student loans, which relates directly to what Professor Fields just said, we could just return to an era of taxpayer funded tuition free public higher education as it used to be in far off exotic Illinois when, let’s say my my parents, Baby Boomers, were in college. But anyway, Stewart Winger.

Q3 Stuart Winger:

Hi, I’m a-

Fields:

Oh, excuse me, let me just say, by the way, that used to be true in New York, too. We had a city university that was tuition free. And there were people who benefited from that taking part in the move of city university tuition.

Reed:

And I think your point, unless I misunderstood it, about affirmative action and higher education focusing on elite universities, at best, there’s a presumption of trickle down benefits for black Americans.

Fields:

At best

Reed:

At best, yeah.  Stewart?

Q3:

Yeah, I’m Stewart Winger. I’m a historian here at Illinois State University, and I don’t really have a question. But since I’m a try hard, you know, I raised my hand anyway. Um, but I did have an I did have an observation, which was that maybe 20 years ago, I might have had difficulty with the idea that that race wasn’t really a thing, but I’ve been teaching some 17th century slave cases in Virginia. And one of them’s about an inheritance dispute between a mixed-race sister and her white half-brother, and the representative of the now deceased father says to the to the white brother, at one point, “Serah, she is your sister.” And you mentioned you use the word somebody who looks like me. And what’s interesting about that, and it comes to the floor is that the question is, look, how flexible is this idea of who looks like me, because if Martians came down, they might think that any drop of of any noticeable European ancestry might make you by definition, white, rather than the odd one drop rule were any wishes to converse in the United States. But of course, that’s not how race works everywhere else in the world, when you break out a spectra, and it’s clearly comes out of different socio economic situations where that gave birth to these forms of racism. But But anyway, I think that might help people understand that, you know, just think what what a Martian might guess, would be the racial categories, without any any…

Fields:

A Martian probably wouldn’t have any notion of racial categories.

Q3:

Right, Right.  That’s a basic problem of the premise of my gizmo. But it is equally logical that you could have the opposite one drop rule on that that would give you, it’s not a very profound point, but I think it illustrates how illusory it is. And you see this phrase, and this would be my question to you, I see it more and more and writing this phrase, somebody who looks like me, which begs the question, what we consider who looks like me. Right?

Fields:

Yeah, that one gets me the same way that of in our DNA, Original Sin, those other formulations that Touré discussed, get me. But on this business of looking like me, Touré may remember this from being my TA. But during the lecture that I called, “The invention of race”, which I give every year, it’s always lecture number six, in my history of the South, I always invite the students to look at whoever is sitting on their, on their right or if nobody’s there on the left. And then I asked to see the hands of all the students in the class who saw somebody there of a different race. And of course, this because it’s Columbia, and most of the students are white, most of them don’t raise their hands, because they don’t look and see somebody of a different race. Now I say, Okay, those of you who didn’t raise your hands, now, I want to see among you, those who looked and saw somebody who looked exactly like you. And one year, I had to emphasize that I said, when I say exactly like you, I mean, so much like you that your parents can’t tell you apart. I have to say that because I had a set of identical twins in the class. But of course, when I asked that question, no hands go up.

The point is, nobody looks like you. So and that’s another reason why this business of children have to see people who look like them that that’s it just drives me crazy. And young children are not even going to notice the characteristics that people think make somebody look like me. I remember as a child of, I don’t know, I must have been four or five or so, my maternal grandparents, and my aunt, my mother would always gather around the television when somebody when an Afro American performer or somebody who’s there. And I always knew they were excited, but I didn’t know what was so special about – I didn’t know what the reason for it was. And as a matter of fact, I always thought that my my aunt, my mother’s sister was white. And I didn’t know that that had any…I didn’t attach any particular notion of race to that. I just thought she was white. I don’t know why, maybe because she wore her hair long or something. And it never occurred to me that that was something that couldn’t be in the same family. It wasn’t the color of her skin, which was the same as mine. Little children don’t look at somebody and think that person looks like me or doesn’t look like me because little children are focused on who knows what. Oh, so I that that expression, along with there’s another one that gets me every time I hear it, black and brown people, because that always reminds me of the thoroughly racist, black and tan designation in late 19th century politics. So as soon as I hear that it doesn’t suggest anti racism to me, it suggests racism.

Reed:

Well, fortunately, I have tenure, so you won’t get me fired with that. But the kids speak and we were basically out of town. But I want to share an anecdote while I’m thinking about the kids reflections on race struck a chord with me, the ones you just shared, because I was telling my father not too long ago, that until I was about 11, or 12, I had just assumed that our family which is you know, from New Orleans, and old masters in the gene pool, but that’s all Massa, it’s in a gene pool. Right. So this is to say that my family is comprised entirely of what we would call in the business, high yellows and red bones, but no white people. And so because of that I had actually assumed and in fact, I’ll add one other layer, most of my older relatives hated white people. So because they’d experienced Jim Crow.  So, and we’re quite clear about that, so my assumption until I was about 12, knowing that there was an African slave trade, obviously, was that our family had originated from North African slaves. And it wasn’t until, so I made this up, right, this is a fiction was the only way I could make sense of what I was seeing. And in my family and my household, and the incongruence of sorts between the reality of old Massa being in the gene pool, as opposed to Rifka. Or Sasha. That’s funny if you’re from the Northeast Corridor, if not, you don’t get that but that’s fine. But but that juxtaposition between again, the obvious light skin complexion of people in my family to imply the white people in the gene pool, and the disdain that many of my older relatives understandably, had for white people. The only way I can make sense of that, particularly in the immediate post Black Power era, when I was a kid was that we were the descendants of Algerians, right, which wasn’t part…

Fields:

Berbers. I had a student I had a student once who, whose mother was Afro American, and father was Moroccan and the Moroccan relatives told him not ever under any circumstances, to tell people that he was black, or even part black, he must tell them that he’s a Berber. Now I have a good friend, who was also, but he got his PhD at Columbia but in medieval Middle Eastern history, and his most recent book, argues against the whole notion of Berbers. It’s called The Invention of Berbers. And what he showed, looking at the documents was that as the Arabs conquered a particular place, whatever people they encountered there before they arrived, became Berbers. So, here’s a process of Berberization that occurs in successive waves, but there’s there there’s no essential Berberism, and he was roundly attacked by people who have a professional stake in the existence of Berbers. And there’s a whole industry of people, for example, linguists, searching for the original Berber language, you know, the the the the language that is the original source, of Berber speaking. And, and similarly, people who disdain the very idea that there could be some question about the existence of this category. Yeah. And he and I immediately saw the relevance of each other’s work to ourselves, because it’s pure racecraft.  That’s what it is, but it’s racecraft that is enforced by that the people who are gatekeepers in the profession. So he had a whole lot of trouble to get his book and his articles, for that matter, on on various subjects, similarly disdainful of the orthodoxies. He had trouble getting them published, because in a small field, there are three or four people who gets to pass judgment on everything:  what gets published in the journals, what books get into the series of the presses and so on. And that is that that is one of the many ways that these fictions can be sustained. Because you have a professional infrastructure that is there to maintain those fictions. And we have the same thing. Sustaining Afro pessimism, sustaining, what is it -racial capitalism – sustaining all of these notions against challenge on the basis of facts. Because there are people who can say, you can publish this; no, you can’t publish that.

Reed:

Well, on that grim note, thank you, Professor Fields for your time and insights. It’s been wonderful. And thank you audience for your your patience with us on our technical glitch.

Fields:

Yes, I have to join my thanks to the audience to yours.

Reed:

So I will get in touch with you, Barbara, because I’m gonna ask a follow up racial capitalism question for our graduate student. And for the rest of you, have a great evening and stay warm.

Fields:

Thank you.