In their book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012), the scholars Barbara and Karen Fields argue that French sociologist Emile Durkheim helps us understand America’s obsession with race. They use Durkheim’s ideas to analyze how the existence of different races comes to seem like an obvious fact and to argue against ostensibly “antiracist” politics that treat racial categories as if they were real. Such politics perpetuate what they purport to resist, grounding race ever more deeply in Americans’ minds while making “straightforward talk about class inequality” impossible.
As this form of counterproductive antiracism becomes hegemonic in our culture, the Fieldses’ insights are increasingly salient. They appeal to the “unwoke” section of the Left that sees identity politics as a distraction from class inequality. Racecraft is frequently cited in the socialist magazine Jacobin and on r/stupidpol, one of the major forums for “class first” political discussion. A Durkheimian analysis of race, however, does not align with the prejudices of either the Left or Right. If the Fields sisters are correct that Durkheim offers a solution to the American race problem, then only a very unwoke Left and a very open-minded Right can apply it.
The need for clearer thinking about race is obvious. Woke orthodoxy has created a situation in which race is at the same time a reality to be constantly acknowledged and an illusion with no basis. A generation ago, polite opinion held that racial differences beyond the merely phenotypical (i.e., in appearance) were imaginary, trivial, or the products of injustices that could be eliminated by social policy.
Today, however, right-thinking people can no longer be “blind” to color. They are enjoined to notice racial differences and reflect on the demographic characteristics of celebrities, co-workers, and romantic partners. Yet some elements of the older discourse persist. Americans cannot be blind to color, but they are still expected to be blind to genes. There is hardly anyone on the American political scene who would speak about a genetic basis of race — at least in public. Race has become omnipresent and inexplicable.
Here, the Fields sisters insist, Durkheim can help. One of the founders of sociology, Durkheim was also one of the first theorists to explain how many aspects of our everyday lives are socially constructed. This does not mean that they are illusory or arbitrary. It means, rather, that they can be understood, and to some extent predicted and manipulated, because they emerge from traceable patterns of social activity. For example, in Durkheim’s analysis, suicide is not, or not merely, an individual act of desperation but a consequence of the atomization and anomie of modern city life. In his masterwork, 1912’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim posited that not only individual behaviors but also aspects of our mental life, including the categories of time and space, depend upon, and change with, our relationship to society.
For the Fieldses, the most important part of Durkheim’s analysis is his account of how group identities are constructed. Groups are held together, he argued, by moral consensus, patterns of collective activity, and moments of shared emotion. For example, we all know that stealing is wrong, how to stand in line, and what to feel as we sing the national anthem. Collective identity is constructed out of these rules, feelings, and habits, but it is so diffuse that it is impossible to think about it without the mediation of some symbol. In order to experience ourselves as members of our social group, we need a “totem.” Writing on the eve of World War I, Durkheim saw “the flag” as such a totem. He noted that soldiers can be so intensely attached to flags that they die fighting to protect them, thinking of a bit of colored cloth rather than the group that it represents.
Race, the Fieldses argue, is such a totem. It is a symbol of group identity, standing in for a set of norms and behaviors that structures our everyday life but recedes from our conscious attention and resists our analysis. The physical features of our bodies — our skin, hair, and gait — are without significance in themselves, but, like the bit of cloth that becomes a flag, become charged with emotion and meaning as bearers of our collective identity.
Durkheim warned that symbols can express the unity of groups but also divide them. In his work on Australian aboriginal clans, he observed that people living side by side identified with opposing totems, insisting that they had no kinship with each other. Members of different clans claimed to be descended from different animals, plants and other nonhuman entities — anything but a common ancestor.
This, the Fieldses argue, is our situation in the contemporary United States. Although we share a common culture, we understand ourselves as members of dissimilar and opposing groups, whose difference lies in our physical features. Our own bodies have become the totems of opposing clans. Undoing the “social fact” of race, the Fieldses suggest, cannot be accomplished either by wishing race away in the manner of “color-blind” liberalism or by insisting that discussions of race be even more central to our politics.
Although they do not fully develop this idea, the Fieldses imply that insights for a productive antiracism could be drawn from Durkheim’s efforts to combat French anti-Semitism. He saw the latter as a perverse form of group identification, in which some Frenchmen understood their national identity through images that presented French Jews as internal enemies, rather than through symbols accessible to all. It was for this reason, Durkheim argued, that anti-Semites in France had framed the Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason — they needed a totem they could see, and hate, to incarnate their passionate attachment to their French identity.
To overcome such divisions, Durkheim called for a program of civic nationalism. Drawing on the mass festivals and patriotic ceremonies of the French Revolution, he proposed that a “religion” based on the worship of the French nation should be preached in the schools. Children should be taught to see themselves, on the one hand, as individuals with inalienable “human rights” and, on the other, as grateful, loyal members of a nation that had made these rights the center of its political life. He also advocated a range of policies to address economic inequality, from restoring the guild system to the abolition of inheritance, in order to eliminate the material conditions that fueled anti-Semitic resentment.
This program, combining economic equality with patriotic ritual, goes far beyond the ideological commitment to constitutional principles that Americans often associate with civic nationalism. It is, as critics of Durkheim such as Raymond Aron argued later in the 20th century, a program of moral transformation no less ambitious in scope than those of totalitarian regimes. But Durkheim held that liberals who shy away from such methods forget that modern liberal democracy began with violent mass movements channeling collective emotions to create new forms of identity. Our regime, he insisted, cannot survive on the basis of merely intellectual assent.
Such authoritarian patriotism is anathema to today’s Left, while Durkheim’s redistributive economic policies and ideas about social constructivism tend to horrify conservatives. But if the Fieldses are right to turn to Durkeim for help escaping our racial nightmare, then those opposed to wokeness on both sides of the political spectrum will need to consider his solution.
Blake Smith is a Harper Schmidt fellow at the University of Chicago, where he works on cultural ties between France and India.
