Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America

Overview

About twenty-five pages, an essay by the historian Barbara Jeanne Fields, first published in the journal New Left Review in 1990 and later reprinted, alongside related work by her sister Karen Fields, in the 2014 book Racecraft, which has become the most accessible way for most readers to encounter the essay outside its original academic journal context. Fields, a historian specializing in the American South and the history of slavery, wrote the essay as a direct methodological intervention within historical scholarship on race and slavery, challenging a common, often unexamined assumption running through much of that scholarship about the actual causal relationship between race and the institution of slavery.

The essay’s central and genuinely reorienting argument inverts the conventional causal story most readers carry, largely unexamined, about how race and slavery relate to one another: rather than treating race as a preexisting biological or cultural fact that then led societies to practice racial slavery, Fields argues that slavery itself, as a specific colonial economic and legal arrangement, required inventing race as an ideology capable of explaining how a society simultaneously proclaiming liberty and equality could justify enslaving one specific group on a permanent, heritable basis.

The argument

Slavery produced race, not race slavery. Fields’s central thesis states this inversion directly: slavery produced race as an explanatory ideology, rather than any preexisting racial category or racial prejudice producing slavery as its natural consequence. This reversal matters because it relocates the historical explanatory burden, rather than asking why racial prejudice led to slavery, Fields asks why and how a specific colonial labor and legal system came to require racial ideology as its own self-justification.

The Virginia origins. Fields grounds this argument in specific, traceable colonial history, particularly in Virginia, where African and European indentured servants initially occupied roughly comparable legal status and social position before a gradual, deliberate sequence of legal changes progressively separated these groups into permanently distinct categories, one increasingly defined as enslaved and heritable, the other not, a process Fields treats as historically documented and traceable rather than as an inevitable or natural development.

Race as ideology, not biology or fixed attitude. Fields insists throughout that race should be understood specifically as an ideology, a historically specific way of explaining and justifying particular social relations, rather than as either a biological fact, which modern genetics does not actually support as a coherent category, or as a simply fixed, unchanging attitude passed down unaltered across generations since its original colonial invention.

Continual re-creation rather than passive inheritance. Fields argues that racial ideology, once established, does not simply persist automatically or passively across subsequent generations, but requires continual, active re-creation through ongoing social, political and economic processes, meaning its persistence into the present reflects ongoing maintenance rather than merely an unbroken, self-sustaining continuity extending back to its original colonial origin.

A warning to historians. Fields’s sharpest and most directly methodological argument warns historians against a specific, common analytical error: treating race as a cause that explains social outcomes, rather than as itself a phenomenon requiring historical explanation. This error, Fields argues, smuggles racial ideology’s own internal, self-justifying logic back into scholarship that should instead be examining critically how and why that ideology was constructed and maintained in the first place.

How to read it

Read Fields’s central inversion, slavery produced race rather than race producing slavery, as doing genuine historical and analytical work rather than as a merely provocative rhetorical formula; the specific historical evidence from colonial Virginia she marshals is meant to demonstrate this causal direction concretely rather than simply assert it.

Pay close attention to Fields’s insistence on race as ideology specifically, a historically specific mode of explanation serving particular social and economic purposes, rather than as either biological fact or simply inherited attitude, since this precise conceptual framing organizes her entire subsequent argument about how race actually functions and persists.

Notice how directly Fields’s warning to historians about treating race as cause rather than as phenomenon requiring explanation targets a specific, common methodological practice within historical scholarship, and consider how widely this warning might apply beyond historical writing specifically, to other forms of analysis that similarly treat race as an unexamined explanatory starting point.

Consider Fields’s argument about continual re-creation as directly relevant to understanding contemporary racial dynamics, not as simple historical residue from a distant colonial past but as an ideology requiring ongoing active maintenance through present social, political and economic processes.

Read this essay alongside its companion material in the later book Racecraft, co-written with her sister Karen Fields, which extends and further develops the argument’s implications considerably beyond what the original, more concise 1990 essay could address within its shorter original scope.

Questions it raises

• Does Fields’s inversion, that slavery produced race rather than race producing slavery, adequately account for how racial ideology, once established, subsequently shaped forms of discrimination and exclusion that extended well beyond the specific institution of slavery itself?
• How does Fields’s insistence on treating race specifically as ideology, rather than as biological fact or simply inherited attitude, change how a reader should understand and respond to contemporary claims and assumptions about racial categories and racial difference?
• What does Fields’s warning against treating race as an explanatory cause suggest about broader patterns in how social scientists and historians handle categories that function ideologically? Does this warning apply usefully to categories beyond race specifically?
• How persuasive is Fields’s specific historical account of racial distinction emerging gradually in colonial Virginia through traceable legal changes, evaluated against alternative historical accounts of how and when racial categories actually developed in colonial North America?
• What does Fields’s argument about racial ideology’s continual re-creation, rather than passive inheritance, suggest about the kind of ongoing social and political work required to actually dismantle or transform that ideology in the present, as opposed to work aimed merely at correcting a static historical inheritance?
• How does Fields’s essay, focused specifically on the United States and on the transatlantic slave trade’s ideological requirements, relate to or differ from accounts of racial ideology’s construction and function in other colonial contexts and other national histories?