Racecraft by Barbara J. Fields

Author:Barbara J. Fields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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1 Originally published as “Origins of the New South and the Negro Question,” Journal of Southern History 57 (November 2001), 811–26. I would like to thank Michael R. West and Lauren F. Winner for comments on the manuscript.

2 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), 1. Page numbers for subsequent references to Origins in this essay are inserted parenthetically in the text. The first edition’s pagination is retained in later reprint editions.

3 One of the rare exceptions appears in the chapter on the Atlanta Compromise (Chap. 13), where Woodward credits Booker T. Washington with having “framed the modus vivendi of race relations in the New South” (356). The framing as race relations was Washington’s work, but Woodward’s argument in the preceding chapters makes clear that the modus vivendi itself had been determined, as it would continue to be, by means of crop lien and sharecropping, law and constitution, rope and faggot. See Michael R. West, The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 55. Even in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which is much more race-relations-oriented than Origins, Woodward betrays his dissatisfaction with the language of race relations: “The peculiarity most often used to distinguish one order from another, however, has been the relation between races, or more particularly the status of the Negro.” C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (3d rev. ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 5. Note the shift from “relation between races” to “the status of the Negro.”

4 Quincy Ewing, “The Heart of the Race Problem,” Atlantic Monthly 102 (March 1909), 389–97 (first quotation on 390, second on 396). An example of the current vogue for “difference” as a category of analysis is Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106 (June 2001), 866–905. Wolfe regards race as “one among various regimes of difference.” After asserting that land and labor are the key to understanding colonial regimes, he chooses to concentrate instead on “discourses of miscegenation” (867).

5 Ewing, “The Heart of the Race Problem,” 396.

6 West, The Education of Booker T. Washington, 12-19, 55–7. West uses the more brutally honest formulation, “Negro Problem.”

7 Considering the volume of private property expropriated without compensation, the investment of former slaves with citizenship, the franchise, and the right to hold governmental office, and the former slaveholders’ loss—albeit temporary—of power within the national state, emancipation in the United States was radical compared to the emancipation of serfs in Europe and slaves elsewhere in the Americas during the nineteenth century. See Barbara Jeanne Fields, “The Advent of Capitalist Agriculture: The New South in a Bourgeois World,” in Thavolia Glymph and John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on the Post-bellum Southern Economy (College Station, TX: Texas A&M Press, 1985), 73–94; and Steven Hahn, “Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 95 (February 1990), 75–98.

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