Theorizing the Racecraft of Health

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14

Abstract

In their 2012 book, Racecraft, Fields and Fields seek to problematize our notions of race by examining the way euphemism and imagination obscure racism as the explanation for inequality. Heideman (2023) points out that “ just as people in various agricultural societies might blame anything from crop failures to social discord on the designs of witches, people in the modern world blame everything from police violence to economic inequality on race” (119), mystifying the true explanations of inequality. Yet, both the sociology of health and the sociology of race and ethnicity have not substantively engaged with the theory in the fourteen years since its publication, and much sociological research continues to talk about inequality in terms of race instead of racism.
I begin to address this gap by theorizing the ‘racecraft of health,’ or the ways that superstition and the imaginary Black body that lie at the core of racism serves to obfuscate racism itself by framing race, implicitly and otherwise, as an inherent biological characteristic. In this paper I will briefly outline the social scientific construction of race as histories of racialized medicalization that contribute to the current ‘racecraft of health.’ Then I will expand on the definition of the racecraft of health, its material consequences, and its limitations, as well as map out the attempts to mitigate racecraft (i.e., the use of race as a proxy for racism) that are already embraced in our sociological study of racial/ethnic health disparities and the social determinants of health–instead, I suggest that consideration of the racecraft of health is most important in the conceptualization and application of research regardless of methodology.

Author

• Maxine K. Wright, University of Washington