Notes on a Theory…

Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among otherwise sensible scholars that race ‘explains’ historical phenomena; specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been set apart for treatment different from that accorded to others. But race is just the name assigned to the phenomenon, which it no more explains than judicial review ‘explains’ why the United States Supreme
Court can declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, or than Civil War ‘explains’ why Americans fought each other between 1861 and 1865.

Only if race is defined as innate and natural prejudice of colour does its invocation as a historical explanation do more than repeat the question by way of answer. And there an insurmountable problem arises: since race is not genetically programmed, racial prejudice cannot be genetically programmed either but, like race itself, must arise historically. The most sophisticated of those who invoke race as a historical explanation—for example, George Fredrickson and Winthrop Jordan—recognize the difficulty. The preferred solution is to suppose that, having arisen historically, race then ceases to be a historical phenomenon and becomes instead an external motor of history; according to the fatuous but widely repeated formula, it ‘takes on a life of its own’. In other words, once historically acquired, race becomes hereditary. The shopworn metaphor thus offers camouflage
for a latter-day version of Lamarckism.

Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.”