"For most people, race is the obvious starting point for discussions of racism. You invert that assumption in Racecraft, arguing that race has no biological basis and therefore can’t be the starting point for any reasonable discussion. You created the word “racecraft” to identify how — when those practices are repeated widely and persevere for decades and centuries — racist practice produces a general belief in race...
Racecraft shares characteristics with witchcraft, two in particular. First, there’s no rational causality. We often speak as if black skin causes segregation or shootings. Second, there’s (witting or unwitting) reliance on circular argument. For example, blood serves as a metaphor of race but is often taken as a feature of race, even by scientifically trained people. So we find explanations meant to be scientific that end up using logic has to deny causality...
What we do in America is to explain inequality by saying there are certain characteristics of people who come out on the wrong end of things.
Since we can’t talk about inequality in America, or at least until very recently we could not, the explanation becomes something inherent in black and Hispanic people...
There is an important difference between identity and identification... Most Afro Americans don’t have any control over identification. Their identity, how they define themselves, how they perceive themselves, can be overruled by that identification. That’s what happens when we see Afro-American police officers killed by their comrades by mistake. Their identity as a police officer is overruled instantly and fatally because the identification takes precedence."
mmmmm. I need to reflect on this for a while.
It's sort of a little shift and sort of a big shift in thinking and framing. And it feels really important and useful and revealing. And a little empowering; returning some ownership to identity<--identification by giving us a better look at how it is constructed.
(credit to MC)
Related: Scientific racism one
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