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Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields , Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London : Verso , 2012, £20.00/$26.95). Pp. 302. ISBN 978 1 84467 994 2 .
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The concept of the "post-racial," much touted by the US commentariat in the period following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, has, in subsequent years, threatened to collapse under the weight of the scholarly broadsides launched against it. "Race," it has been counterargued, remains an obdurate factor in American society, its capacity to determine life chances being evident in everything from professional sports-coaching appointments to criminal conviction rates. Karen and Barbara Fields, sisters and well established "Afro-American" (the authors' preferred term) scholars in the disciplines of sociology and history respectively, bring some much-needed clarity to a debate too often distorted by the bromides enunciated by liberal champions of a post-racial America as well as the pseudo-radical cultural politics of their academic critics.
"Race," the authors argue, cannot continue to be at once dismissed as a biological fiction only to be then all too readily reinscribed as a social fact around which all manner of essentialisms can be marshalled. Instead, they contend, the specific converging historical factors...