Barbara J. Fields

Barbara J. Fields is a historian of the American South at Columbia whose essay Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America, published in New Left Review in 1990, argues that race is not a fact of nature but an ideology, produced by the need to justify slavery in a republic founded on liberty, and reproduced daily by the practices that assume it. It has become one of the most assigned essays on the subject, and she extended the argument with her sister Karen in Racecraft. She appeared in Ken Burns’s The Civil War and is the one living historian on the Columbia core.