Of Rouges and Geldings

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:17:48 +1000

Of Rouges and Geldings is a chapter from Barbara and Karen Fields book Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. The chapter was also originally published as an article in the American History Review on the 1st of December 2003.

“Race” too often recommends itself as a guiltless word, a neutral term for an empirical fact. It is not. Race appears to be a neutral description of reality because of the race-racism evasion, through which immoral acts of discrimination disappear, and then reappear camouflaged as the victim’s alleged difference. This chapter documents the career of that evasion and examines its pernicious corollaries. In the symposium in which the article was first published, a distinguished historian set out to interpret America’s history as the story of “ethnoracial mixture” among immigrants of varying origins, including European. To read the entire symposium is to be reminded that early twentieth-century racists—and bio-racists—did not spare notionally white people.¹

Barbara J. Fields on Class Letters

Of Rouges and Geldings