Race on Class Letters

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

An interview with historian Clayborne Carson on the New York Times' 1619 Project

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:32:17 +0000

The following is a copy of an interview given by the American historian Clayborne Carson with the World Socialist Web Site. I found it illuminating for it’s discussion on the demarcation and bracketing of historical movements, those that are latent… those which are eventually born.

Clayborne Carson is professor of history at Stanford University and director of its Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. He is the author and editor of numerous books on King and the civil rights movement. Carson was chosen by Coretta Scott King to oversee the publication of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Seven of 14 planned volumes have been published under his direction.

The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought: an excerpt from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 01:51:19 +0000

Chapter five from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain by Dan Stone.

As we have seen, before the First World War, and in some circles until well into the interwar period, eugenics — literally, ‘well born’ or ‘good stocks’— was the height of sophisticated, ‘progressive’ thought.¹ Across Europe, the novels and plays of the period, such as H. G. Wells’s The New Machiavelli (1911) and George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman (1905), are suffused with the language of race-regeneration and fears of physical deterioration. In Arthur Schnitzler’s novel, The Road to the Open (1908), Berthold Stauber, a young and enthusiastic Viennese Jewish physician, tells his father, the humane Dr Stauber, that ‘You need only consider, father, that the most honest and consistent social hygiene would have the direct result of annihilating diseased people, or at any rate excluding them from all enjoyment of life, and I don’t deny that I have all kinds of ideas tending in that way which may seem cruel at the first glance.’ He went on to say that ‘You needn’t be afraid, father, that I shall begin straight away to preach the murder of the unhealthy and superfluous. But theoretically that’s certainly what my programme leads to.’² Although primarily a conservative ideology, both left and right were attracted to eugenic proposals. These ranged from ‘positive’ measures such as the encouragement of ‘hygienic marriage’, that is, marriage between two people of good stock, to ‘negative’ measures such as sterilisation or segregation in order to ensure that the unfit, feeble-minded and morally degenerate did not have children. In this chapter I will consider eugenics in general, before concentrating on one aspect of its rhetoric which to a post-Second World War audience is perhaps even more shocking than it was to an Edwardian one.

Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:59:16 +0000

Due to the prolific number of footnotes that Michael’s article contains, the essay will simply be linked to here. It is an important walk through the trajectories that various essentialist concepts have taken in the course of modern Northern American history. What surprised me most was this quasi-progess — where it appears that the concept of race has been disposed of, it’s kernel is carried over into a different, yet sadly, familial form.

Race on Class Letters

Of Rouges and Geldings

An interview with historian Clayborne Carson on the *New York Times' 1619 Project*

The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought: an excerpt from *Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain*

Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity

An interview with historian Clayborne Carson on the New York Times' 1619 Project

The 'Lethal Chamber' in Eugenic Thought: an excerpt from Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain