The concept of the “post-racial,” much touted by the US commentariat in the period following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, has, in subsequent years, threatened to collapse under the weight of the scholarly broadsides launched against it. “Race,” it has been counterargued, remains an obdurate factor in American society, its capacity to determine life chances being evident in everything from professional sports-coaching appointments to criminal conviction rates. Karen and Barbara Fields, sisters and well established “Afro-American” (the authors' preferred term) scholars in the disciplines of sociology and history respectively, bring some much-needed clarity to a debate too often distorted by the bromides enunciated by liberal champions of a post-racial America as well as the pseudo-radical cultural politics of their academic critics.

“Race,” the authors argue, cannot continue to be at once dismissed as a biological fiction only to be then all too readily reinscribed as a social fact around which all manner of essentialisms can be marshalled. Instead, they contend, the specific converging historical factors that have served to generate our collective confusion must be reinterrogated if we are to make sense of the past and present. Thus, drawing on C. Vann Woodward's insights in Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (1957), Barbara Fields's work on slavery – several thesis-stating essays from which are included here – reminds us that it was first and foremost a system designed to maximize profit from labour itself reduced to a species of capital. This may seem like an obvious point but Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained provides some sense of how entrenched the idea of slaveholders as singularly hell-bent on brutalizing (and thus potentially devaluing) their capital investments has come to be in the popular historical consciousness of the neoliberal era. The primary mode of oppression was the exploitation of the slaves' labour – Tarantino's salacious focus on sex and violence has more to do with the commercial imperatives of twenty-first-century Hollywood than it does with slaveholding in the 1850s.

The social tensions apparent within nineteenth-century arguments over the relative merits of free, unfree and wage labour were lessened as a result of intensifying ideas about racial difference. These ideas themselves had an earlier provenance in the fanciful biological and social-scientific conjectures of figures such as Jefferson and Calhoun. “Racecraft” is the helpful coinage that the authors introduce as a way of making sense of this conflation at the conceptual level between “race” and racism. Like witchcraft in the early modern era, they claim, racecraft retains its grip by rationalizing into existence ideas discredited at other social levels, via “circular reasoning” (198) and other forms of fallacious logic. Racecraft is therefore a kind of popular rationale that inserts “race” into explanatory frameworks where we might expect to find less “superstitious” understandings of cause and effect. The most glaring of those frameworks, as the book's subtitle indicates, relates to the ways in which social inequality in the US has been rationalized. It's important, in the contemporary context, to note that the Fields are as scathing about advocates of affirmative action as they are about more historically entrenched and reactionary manifestations of race-thinking. They castigate the former in uninhibited terms as among those “unable to even define injustice except by enhancing the authority and prestige of race”; their “most radical goal … remains the reallocation of unemployment, poverty, and injustice rather than their abolition” (147).

As “social alchemy” (261), or, to deploy an apposite metaphor, something of a “witch's brew,” racecraft represents a peculiarly modern metaphysics of the subject, a speculative philosophy underwritten by unequal social relations and arbitrary taxonomies of human identity. In an account strikingly similar to the famous one presented in the first chapter of Marx's Capital, the Fields present a postmetaphysical understanding of capitalist society. Like Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, racecraft diagnostics provide us with a powerful set of tools capable of destabilizing normative assumptions that seek to render oppression invisible by naturalizing what is social (and therefore subject to human management). Race thus stands to human identity something like market forces are often said to stand to the twenty-first-century global economy: that is, as an immoveable, “natural” structure to which humans can only defer. Most potent among those phenomena concealed by racecraft, according to the authors, is a shared experience of exploitation among the majority of Americans, past and present, “white” and “nonwhite.”

The book is perhaps a mite too long and operates most effectively when historicizing and theorizing in less oblique fashion – certain chapters allow the idea of racecraft itself to slide from view. However, the governing concept is undoubtedly indispensable and may well serve to provoke the type of class-oriented debate anyone genuinely interested in achieving a “post-racial” society should welcome.