Barbara and Karen Fields: We see race not as a physical fact, but as a product of racism. And we see racism not as an attitude or a state of mind, like bigotry: it’s an action. It’s acting on a double standard, with that double standard itself based on ancestry or supposed ancestry. […] Racecraft shares characteristics with witchcraft–two in particular. First, there’s no rational causality. We often speak as if black skin causes segregation or shootings. Second, there’s (witting or unwitting) reliance on circular argument. For example, blood serves as a metaphor of race, but is often taken as a feature of race, even by scientifically trained people. So we find explanations meant to be scientific that end up using logic has to deny causality. For instance, they say Black people get this disease or that Black people have more of a certain blood factor than others, with a certain statistical frequency, but you can’t derive a causal explanation from a statistical frequency. If everyone takes race for granted, there’s no reason that scientists would wean themselves from doing the same. Race is the category they start and end with. When you have arguments or observations that do without workaday causality in the 21st century, you are on a terrain very similar to that of believers in witchcraft. In Racecraft we tell a story about a study of asthma among children living in the Bronx. The researchers had children wear monitors so they could find out exactly what emissions were in the air and what the children were actually breathing in. They reported the results and concluded the high volume of truck traffic, because of the nearby highways, contributed to the high incidence of asthma. The story as reported in the New York Times featured commentary by an expert, who agreed that the study showed this and that environmental factor had been shown to be contributors. But he said the high incidence of asthma also had to do with the high percentage of Hispanic and black children in the area. It was reported uncritically that being Hispanic or black ranked along with the actual causes of their susceptibility to asthma. That reasoning makes as much sense as claiming the things that cause asthma are pollution but also speaking Spanish in the household. Everybody would see that was ridiculous, but miss the anomaly when the subject is race. That’s what racecraft is. More here.