Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> Ultimately race
> cannot be the explanans; it must be the explanadum (I forgot the Latin
> terms).
I too forget the Latin, but Rakesh identifies here an intellectual error which may be almost endemic to maillist discussion, the endless affirmation that X explains Y when, in fact, it is X, not Y, that requires an explanation. Very, very roughly, Fields argues that the continuous oppression and exploitatation of a "marked" group in a culture which officially proclaims the equality of all humans leads to a rationalization (sometimes overt but just as often spontaneous) of that oppression through the invention of that biological monstrosity "race." This can be crudely sloganized as "Racism didn't cause slavery; slavery caused racism." You can see Fields building the basis for such an argument in her historical monograph, *Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland in the 19th Century*. In her NLR article she shows, among many other things, that the great racist bugaboo of "miscegenation" is mostly absent from 17th and early 18th century thought and activity.
I think one reason so many have such a hard time even grasping the nature of Fields's argument is their lack of knowledge/appreciation of the grip that hierarchical modes of thinking had on the ancient, medieval, and early modern world, and the rootedness of that sort of thinking in the actual social relations and human practices that prevailed until late in the 18th century (and which, incidentally, as Mark Twain hilariously noted, continued to grip the south until after the Civl War), and the way in which such thinking made quite unnecessary complicated ideological justifications and / or rationalizations of all forms of oppression
and exploitation.
In a part of Plato's Republic which might have been intended to influence current practice he argues vigorously that his ideal state (conceived, of course, as a Greek City) when it went to war should not enslave fellow Greeks. Now one does not argue that people should walk on their legs rather than their hands. One only argues against actual practices. That is, it was standard practice for Greek City States at war to enslave prisoners of war. That is, there was no real touch of racism in Greek slavery. I don't know in which dialogue, but elsewhere Plato makes one of the few defenses of slavery anyone in the ancient world ever thought it useful to make, it was taken so for granted. He suggested that a free man would commit suicide rather than be a slave, hence all slaves were natural slaves. Marx's personal hero, Spartacus, incidentally, was not opposed to the institution of slavery: he and his followers merely thought that *they* ought not to be slaves. Had they succeeded in escaping beyond the bounds of the Roman Empire, they undoubtedly would have proceeded to own slaves themselves.
Fields is not isolated in her position. A number of historians have remarked, half seriously, that the origin of racism can be dated quite precisely: July 4, 1776, with the promulgation of the words, "all men are created equal." Those words of course reflected the actual individual consciousness of innumerable free artisans, farmers, and even laborers in the north and hence posed a sharp contradictio to the obviously unequal status of black slaves (and by this time slavery had become black slavery, not through the operation of racism but for intensely practical political and economic reasons, just as early slavery in the tobacco fields had been primarily the white indentured servants whose terms (because of the high death rate of such labor) was effectively lifelong.
Incidentally, arguments similar to Fields's are to be found in Chapters 3 and 4 of Stephanie Coontz, *The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families 1600-1900* (London & New York: Verso, 1988). (I have not read Coontz's later books, but all her work is probably of great importance in providing ammunition in the battle against "family values." At the time of *Social Origins* she worked at Evergreen State College. Perhaps her teaching is part of the forces which led to the recent invitation a graduation class there issued to Mumia.)
Carrol