Racecraft: Constructing Race

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Good evening. This is
Radio Free Beszel.

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I am Alphonse. Tonight:
Racecraft.

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Race is invisible. It's
not the color of

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somebody's skin. If it
were, we wouldn't

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much care about it any more
than we care about

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the color of clothes that
they wear. But race is

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something deeper. It is
an invisible quality

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that we imagine is within
people - something

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about personality, or character,
or intellect, or

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something else - and skin
color is just a sign,

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an indicator of that inner
quality. And that

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invisible imagined inner quality
has been taken to

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explain things in the world.
Things like poverty,

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inequality and crime.
But it is imaginary.

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It's imaginary because we
don't actually have a

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mechanism. We don't have
something within people

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that we know causes, in
a sense, race. We as

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human beings often think
that invisible things

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are the most important
ones of all - more

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important than the things
that we can see:

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gods, for example, or spirits.
People who are

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religious believe that God
is the most important

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thing of all - but we can't
see him. People who

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are or were animists believe
that in rocks and

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trees there are invisible
entities. The problem we

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have is that the material
world lacks in meaning.

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We have physical explanations
for physical

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causes. We know why when
you drop something

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it falls. But we can't explain
why good things

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or bad things happen to people.
We can't explain

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what the purpose of life
is. And to find that, we

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layer the material world
with an invisible world.

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And that invisible world
explains much.

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It explains why there
is inequality,

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poverty and crime, in
the case of race.

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It explains why bad things
or misfortune

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happens to people in the
case of witchcraft,

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which I explained in
a previous episode.

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It explains that we
are coherent beings

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with pasts and futures
and personalities.

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It explains why we
have relationships

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with other people,
because of love.

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Fundamentally, as creatures
of meaning and

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narrative, we live in an unseen
world. And race is

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one of those unseen things.
But the thing is that

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race is not only invisible,
but it's imaginary. It

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has no seat in the body. There
is no organ that we

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can point to and say that
causes race. We do have

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statistical correlations.
We can find correlations

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between race and various
phenomena in the world:

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but that doesn't mean that
there's something

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inside somebody that we
call race that causes

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those correlations. Correlation
is not causation.

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But in fact race does exist.
If it didn't exist,

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black men wouldn't have
to fear being beaten

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by police in America more
than white men do.

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The thing is, however, that
race is not inside

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people. It's outside. It's
a social construction

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we created, as I described
in the previous

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episode, through assorted
social practices and

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interactions. We create
it when government

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census forms ask you
to record your race.

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We create it when news
articles describe the

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races of people or scientific
articles give race.

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But there's a sleight of
hand that happens. And

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here I go to the title of
the episode, Racecraft,

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which is a book, in fact,
by a pair of sisters -

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Afro-American scholars Karen
and Barbara Fields.

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They say, quote, "disguised
as race,

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racism becomes something
Afro-Americans are

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rather than something racists
do." In other words,

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racism is, in part, practices
that locate race as

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a quality within the individual
rather than

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something that's constructed
by the society.

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Now one of the arguments
of contemporary

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anti-racism is that although
race is socially

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constructed, through being
socially constructed

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it becomes real. Black people
within the United

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States share an experience
of racism, and

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this experience unifies
them - it gives

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them a single quality
that they all share

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- and that through that,
race becomes real.

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But there's something else
the anti-racists claim.

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Because the question is,
how is it that all these

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black people have this
unified experience?

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What is it that makes
them all the same?

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Why is it that there's
racism in the society?

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Where does that come from?
The social justice

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answer, the anti-racist answer,
is that it comes

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from white people - it
comes from whiteness.

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But that simply relocates
the invisible quality

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from one group of people
to another. And that

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quality too must be socially
constructed - unless

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we are to find some organ
within people that

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makes them white. And that
whiteness explains

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things in the same way
that blackness does.

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Where in the past blackness
would be taken to

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explain inequality, now
whiteness is. It's the

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exact same story as before,
and it's performing

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the same function. When we
look at the world and

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we want to find explanations
for why things

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happen, particularly bad
things, exactly as

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I explained in my episode
on witchcraft, we don't

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want to say that it happened
because of things. We

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don't want to say it happen
because of chance,

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and we don't want to say
it happen because of

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complex systems. We want
to have somebody to

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blame. And racism does
that. Blackness does

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that. Whiteness does that.
But that doesn't mean

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that blackness and whiteness
are real. They are

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real as concepts that have
been come up with,

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but they don't actually
reside within people.

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And yet we know exactly where
they come from. We

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can see them being constructed,
just as we can see

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other social constructions
being constructed: in

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the census forms, in the
academic papers, in the

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journalism, in thousands
of things that Americans

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live with day in and day
out from a young age on

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that make race seem like
a natural quality

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in the world that
was always there.

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For outsiders this can seem
somewhat absurd. I'm

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not American, and it's only
recently in life that

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I've really come to accept
that a lot of Americans

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think that race is real in
the sense of being an

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innate quality. As someone
who didn't grow up

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with it that just seems
obviously to be false.

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There's a misunderstanding
about what

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it's meant to say that
one is colourblind.

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It doesn't mean that one does
not see skin colour.

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It means that one does
not see that invisible

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quality of race that is supposed
to be within and

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innate in every person.
The Fields sisters say,

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"the first principle in racism
is belief in race."

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To be colourblind is to
not believe in race.

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Racism is not like race.
We can see racism.

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We see when a black man
is beaten by police.

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Racism is real acts. Racism
is real things that happen.

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Relocating it into an
invisible quality

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of individuals, as the
Fields sisters say,

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erases those actions.
But what social

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justice and anti-racism
have done

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is to take racism as well
and turn it from actions

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into states of consciousness.
Racism now becomes

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something that's invisible
inside people that

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needs to be eradicated,
rather than something

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that's constructed in the
world through processes

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that we can see and that
we can engage. With this

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approach - treating whiteness
and blackness as

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if within people, treating
racism as if it's an

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invisible quality and ignoring
the practices

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- all of this sidelines
the actual practices

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and activities that construct
all of these

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things. The reason that
race and racism persist

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is that we reconstruct them
with every generation.

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This is Alphonse for
Radio Free Beszel.

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www.bessel.com. Good night.