Summary Of The Origins Of Racial Ideology In America By Barbara Fields

In the articles in question, Barbara Fields examines the origins of racial ideology in America. She sets out to debunk the idea that “race is an observable physical fact, a thing, rather than a notion that is profoundly, and in its very essence, ideological”. Many Americans, including historians, ascribe to race “a transhistorical, almost metaphysical status that removes it from all possibility of analysis and understanding”. She challenges the notion that racialism was a natural, reflexive, response of Americans to physical differences (in this case, skin colour); and argues that these ideas derived their importance from the context surrounding them. Race as a concept has a very specific historical lineage- “Contact alone was not sufficient to call [race] into being, nor was the enslavement of Africans by Europeans, which lasted for some time before race became its prominent justification”. …show more content…
Race was an outgrowth of “bourgeoisie social relations and the ethos of rationality and science in which these social relations were ideologically reflected”. It represented an attempt to reassert the inferiority of Afro-Americans along the Enlightenment’s scientific first principles since this was fast becoming the only legitimate basis for ordering human groups. If all men were created equal, there had to be an explanation of why some men (and women) were neither free nor equal. Race thus emerged as a way of solving the contradictions between a society that enshrined the existence of free individuals while simultaneously holding slaves. Holding Afro-Americans to be inferior by virtue of their race allowed the loss of their freedom and rights to become an inherent fact, needing no more