Religion, Racecraft, and the “Tyranny of Convention”

This paper will develop a theological and religious account of language using the work of Stanley Cavell and show its explanatory power in critiquing and analyzing racial unfreedom in America. By engaging Cavellian reflections on the “tyranny of convention” in conversation with Barbara and Karen Fields’ account of racial ideology together, I will argue that racial unfreedom can be best understood within ordinary language philosophy and its theological and religious inflections. By doing so, I will highlight, why, in the pursuit of liberation and freedom, the language of race has persisting significance for practitioners of religion in and outside of Christianity. 

Karen and Barbara Fields’ book, entitled Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, argues that racism produces race, making the language of race an after-fact of human action (“racecraft”). (37-50) As such, race is not a metaphysical fact (real or ideal), but an ideology with a historical beginning. For the Fields’, the key originating point is in American chattel slavery, where a new mode of justification was required to render the reality of inequality (slavery) intelligible and, as a result, legitimate. Racial ideology can have real effects (despite its unreality) and names what people conventionalize to render practical agency in an unequal world possible and rational. (138-9) This does not entail that race as an ideology refers to attitudinal disposition. Instead, it is interpretive schema that is self-verified in human action as it coincides with the reality of relating to others.  

Racecraft as a practice in modern society is described by the Fields’ as something akin to a religious practice in that it conjures a (racialized) vision of the world for the sake of stabilizing all the myriads of class and labor relations within American society (including but in no way limited to plantation masters and slaves). (193-224) While this account offers a promising explanation for the persistence of race in modern America, it leaves unanswered the question of whether religious understandings of race merely function for nefarious justification. Does Christianity or other religious traditions have something to offer beyond stabilizing racial capitalism? To answer this question, the rest of this paper will offer a way to make sense of racecraft through the theological and philosophical legacy of Stanley Cavell.  

It is not insignificant that Racecraft begins its argument with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s invocation of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s statement that “In the beginning was the deed.” (1) Unknowingly, the Fields’ sisters harken to the traditions of theological and philosophical reflection on the nature of language. For Christianity, this legacy originates in the gospel of John, where “in the beginning was the Word.” (John 1:1) This sentence reached an inflection point at the Council of Nicaea which argued for the divinity of Jesus Christ as the Word of God, thus embedding reflection on language with reflection on God, and vice versa. Over time, this thought pattern makes the claim, as exemplified in Goethe, that to know God as Word is to understand language as inextricable from an account of human agency more generally. 

This theological and philosophically significant notion of language as action (and action as language) is what drives Cavell’s work. To learn a word is to learn a form of life. As such, navigating words entails navigating the world in the context of action and interests native to our human nature. (Claim of Reason, 168-90) The conventions we create and inherit are fully natural to who we are as linguistic animals expressing our systematic yet never fully explored level of agreement in humanness. At the same time, this agreement in the human form of life is always re-created in our everyday life together as a human community seeking to find a voice that can be ours and be shared by other humans. (31-2) In seeking agreement and grappling with skepticism, the criteria we use to understand our agreements are “re-created” in our continual convening of conventions. (Affeldt, “The Ground of Mutuality”)  

With Cavell, the naturalness of conventions implies the projectability of language. This involves growing and developing ourselves and our ability to use language in our shared form of life. In learning, we constantly re-convene our criteria and re-create them for our shared routes of interests. This act of projection and re-creation plays a significant role in the philosophical and theological works of Stephen Mulhall and Rowan Williams, respectively. In both, we see that language’s perfectionism mirrors our life with God as open-ended but highly structured beyond our wildest imaginations. Our naturalness for linguistic projections signals our desire to encapsulate the whole of reality but is one that endlessly fails (because of the naturalness of finitude) thereby continuing the process of re-convening criteria and critical appraisal native to our use of language.  

This human account of imaging God by imaging God’s infinite desire in language verifies the naturalness of conventions and their linguistic projectability. This theological and philosophical truth, I argue, helps to account for how our natural conventions are complicit in the history of “racecraft” of America. In the language of Cavell, racial capitalism is a religion which ritually re-creates the criteria and ideology of race (racecraft) for evaluating exploited others within the hierarchy of humanity to confirm everyday experience. To learn the language of race, requires continually projecting it to meet the new and changing circumstances of American unfreedom and thus naturalizing these very facts. "Underlying the tyranny of convention is the tyranny of nature." (CoR, 110-1) 

Race as a language we inherit is thus congruent with our constitution as creatures that are responsible through and for what we say. (“Must We Mean What We Say?”) If this is so, what makes for creaturely life beyond the unfreedom of racism? By addressing this question, in the light of Cavell and the Fields’ sisters’ work, I will specify how race as an alternative form of perfectionist critique must reckon with its difficult past to live up to its theological legacy of freedom for all.