Barabara Fields Article
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996
From: David Herr
Subject: article query
Craig Friend writes:
I hope someone can help me locate an article by Barbara Fields on the understanding and use of "ideology" in early American history. A friend recommended the article but could recall only that "it might be in a collection of essays." My library has neither the books nor reference capacities to assist me. Thanks in advance.
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996
From: David Herr
[Editor's note: Thanks to everyone who responded to this query.]
Brian Kelly writes:
Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in Kousser, J. Morgan and James M. McPherson, eds., _Region, Race and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, Oxford, 1982: 143-177
Fields, "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the USA," New Left Review 181 (1990): 95-118
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I believe the article you're looking for is Barbara Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review 181 (May/June 1990), 95-118.
There's a literature developing devoted to the discussion/critique of some of Fields' positions in this piece (and its predecessor, found in Kousser and McPherson, eds., Region, race, and Reconstruction : essays in honor of C. Vann Woodward.) See: Alden Vaughan, Roots of American Racism(136-174); also George Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race 156 and (implicitly) passim; and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.
I'd welcome an H-South discussion of this complex and compelling article, particularly concerning its usefulness in undergraduate classrooms.
Steve Kantrowitz
UW-Madison
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996
From: Paul Harvey
To Steve Kantrowitz and others: I too am interested in the mini- controversy over the Fields piece, and I wonder if you, Steven K. or someone else, could tell me something about what the status of the scholarly debate is, since I feel that I have only a partial handle on that. I understand that "whiteness" scholars have taken on the piece, but I don't completely understand why because my understanding is that she does not deny the symbolic value of race, nor I think would she deny the "psychic compensation" described by Du Bois as a wage of whiteness. So, I guess I am muddy on what the terms of the debate are.
I used the piece before for a senior history seminar at Berkeley. I assigned it at the beginning of the semester, and then again at the end. I found that these very bright and capable students just didn't "get" the piece at the beginning but were fired up about it, positively and negatively, by the end. All of which makes me wonder whether lower-division students such as I now teach, could handle it. I would be interested to hear about other experiences.
Paul Harvey Dept. of History
1346 N. Weber Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs, CO 80903 1420 Austin Bluffs Pkwy., P. O. Box 7150
(719) 632-0917 Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150
(719) 262-3475
Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996
From: Paul Harvey
For Pat Rael and others: Thanks for the Fields replies, it's been a while since I have read it or used it in class and you clarified the relationship between her work and the "whiteness" work. An article in Lingua Franca I recently read suggested that the whiteness scholars had defined themselves in opposition (in part) to her essay, but that seems not to be the case. Can we say that, while both would agree that race itself, being a social construction, is not a causative factor in history (though I wonder if that is true for epidemeological history), that nevertheless notions of race, such as whiteness and blackness, have been causative, particularly when and where they intersect with class identity? Class therefore is more real than "race," as Fields suggests, but it is not more "real" than powerful notions of race.
I wonder if scholars of gender and race have addressed Fields. Any ideas on that? There would seem to be an analogous argument regarding gender vs. notions of gender.
Paul Harvey Dept. of History
1346 N. Weber Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs, CO 80903 1420 Austin Bluffs Pkwy., P. O. Box 7150
(719) 632-0917 Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150
(719) 262-3475
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996
From: David Herr
I have used Field's New Left Review piece ("Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America") in an upper-division class on race, nationality, and ethnicity. The piece worked very well with advanced students, but I would not use it in an introductory level course.
As for the debate . . .
Fields' argument contains two main assertions:
1. Race is a socially constructed category, rather than a biological fact. Racial identity and racial categories are products of history and are thus fluid and changeable.
2. The driving forces of history are to be found in the material conditions of life. Race, being ideological in nature rather than material in nature, cannot therefore not be a driving force of history. Racial identity is a product of history, but it is not a causative factor in history.
Assertion number one now borders on almost universal acceptance among scholars of race and ethnicity. It is, in fact, the starting point and defining feature of a new wave of scholarship on race and ethnicity produced by folks like Dave Roediger, Marilyn Halter, Virginia Dominquez, and many, many others.
Assertion number two is the controversial one.
Operating within a traditional Marxist framework, Fields argues for the primacy of material conditions in historical causation. Class relations are, for Fields, the driving force of history because class relations are rooted in the material conditions of life. Race, she suggests, is not causative because it is purely ideological in nature. Race may, on a day-to-day basis, shape people's lives, but over the long course of history it is, in her view, ephiphenomenal.
Her critics, such as Dave Roediger, have suggested that she has pushed the traditional Marxist emphasis on material conditions too far. Ideological notions like race, they suggest, can become causative factors in history.
Fields argument implies a critique of black nationalist politics. For Fields, neither racial nor national identity are an appropriate basis for a politics of social transformation. It is the implicit political content of her analysis that, in my view, is responsible for the passions of the debate that her work has aroused.
Joel Sipress
University of Wisconsin-Superior
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Paul, I've wondered about this as well. It seemed to me that those of Reodiger's ilk would appreciate Fields' concern with the "social constructionist" approach to white racial identity. I suspect, though I'm not sure, that they differ from her in priviledging race as a category of analysis just as important as class, and would never assert that "class" is somehow more "real," as she does in these pieces. I think *they* would say (and I must agree) that, even though they are so deeply concerned with class identities, Fields overstates the case for class, in the process undermining the significance of race. Though her work seems crucial in defining terms of debate for those interested in "whiteness," the latter would priviledge a more equal joining of those two categories in their work.
In The Wages of Whiteness, Reodiger says that Fields' idea that race is "entirely socially and historically constructed as an ideology" is a concept that underpins the book (7). But he departs from Fields when he sees her claiming that "race disappears into the 'reality' of class (8). In Love and Theft, Eric Lott invokes Fields when it suits him, and apparently without conflict. Yet his argument doesn't seem to hinge on the distinctions Fields draws between racial and class ideologies. In fact, his work seems (like Reodiger's) to rely on their practical and functional equivelancy. This also seems to be the case with Alexander Saxton (White Republic) and Ronald Takaki (Iron Cages), who both seek to understand the inter-twining of race and class in ways that do not seem to privilege the "reality" of one over the other. The point seems to be that, even if race and class are historically constructed in different ways, it is most important to understand the ways they operate together. David Theo Goldberg, as much as I understand his convoluted prose, seems to argue the same thing, with perhaps more sensetivity to the dynamics Fields brings up.
I've not used the articles in class, though I intend to in a seminar on racial thought.
Patrick Rael
Bowdoin College
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 1996
From: Joel Sipress
> An article in Lingua Franca I recently read suggested that the whiteness > scholars had defined themselves in opposition (in part) to her > essay, but that seems not to be the case. Can we say that, while > both would agree that race itself, being a social construction, is > not a causative factor in history (though I wonder if that is true > for epidemeological history), that nevertheless notions of race, such > as whiteness and blackness, have been causative, particularly when > and where they intersect with class identity? Class therefore is > more real than "race," as Fields suggests, but it is not more "real" > than powerful notions of race. > > > Paul Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs >
"Whiteness" scholars, such as Roediger, would probably agree with this formulation, while Fields would not. Both would agree that "race," in the biological sense of the word, is not causative. Fields, however, would also argue that "notions of race" are not causative. Remember-- she is arguing that the driving forces of history are to be found in the material conditions of life, not in ideological notions like "race."
Joel Sipress
University of Wisconsin-Superior
______________________
For a concise argument concerning the chicken-or-the-egg controversy (which came first - racism or slavery) see Alden T. Vaughan's Roots of American Racism New York : Oxford University Press , 1995. Chapter Seven - The Origins Debate - covers the hisotriography of the question and where Fields' article fits. Vaughan offers a critique of the article that is not related to the Marxist position we have been discussing.
David Herr
Editor, H-South
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 1996
From: Chris Morris
Just an observation that bears only somewhat on the topic.
Has anyone noticed that much of what Fields said in her important article on race and ideology was said forty years earlier by anthropologist Robert Redfield, "Race as a Social Phenomenon," in Edward T. Thompson and Everett C. Hughes, eds. Race: Individual and Collective Behavior (1958), 66-71.
Of course, Redfield emphasized social contexts that created "race situations," when superficial racial differences were given special meanings, whereas Fields emphasizes class relations as providing the context for the formation of racial ideologies. But the similarities are there, especially the idea that race, because it is socially constructed, changes, sometimes rather quickly. I don't believe Fields cites Redfield, indicating that she/we have in a sense reinvented the wheel. This time, perhaps, we are more prepared to use it (the wheel).
Chris Morris
Texas at Arlington
Humanities & Social
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