Race is a fiction, racism is real

It’s no wonder that Jamelle Bouie’s short videos are just as interesting and informative as his NY Times columns. In a recent TikTok video (mirrored on Instagram), Bouie recommends a book called Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields and sums up the premise:

That’s how the Fields sisters see it – and I think they’re right – race is a fiction, it doesn’t exist biologically, it’s a social construct, it’s meant to categorize and it often obscures much more than it explains. But racism is real, isn’t it? Racism, the act, is real, it’s material, it affects people’s lives, it’s a matter of life and death, it determines the way we engage and are received in the society we live in.

The example they give at the beginning of the book is: Imagine a black police officer is killed by one of his white colleagues. He goes undercover and gets shot. The news would say the cop was killed because he was black. But the Fields sisters would say: Wait a minute. Did the white cop shoot because he was white? That blackness caused the death, that whiteness caused the shooting? No, of course not. What happened was that a white police officer relied on racist assumptions about people of African descent to reach a set of conclusions and then acted on those conclusions.