Witchcraft Masking the Interconnected Roots of Oppression

Rev. KP Hong, Beloved Community Staff Team

​We no longer believe that witches ride on broomsticks or that witchcraft was at work in the mysterious illness and the contagion of panic that swept throughout Salem in 1692. But for false accusations to gain traction, go to trial, and result in imprisonment and executions, there had to be widespread complicity from public officials and institutions willing to give legitimacy to spectral evidence. Physicians pointed to witchcraft as the cause of illnesses, ministers publicly confirmed signs of the devil, magistrates conducted interrogations and pushed for prosecutions, judges and the apparatus of the government gave the go-ahead, all enabling the escalation of mass hysteria and the very real consequences of the Salem witch trials.

In their seminal work, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012), sociologist Karen Fields and historian Barbara Fields draw a compelling analogy between witchcraft and racecraft. Both are systems of belief, a form of social alchemy, that explain real events through imaginary causes. Just as witchcraft attributes misfortune to malevolent acts of imagined witches, racecraft rationalizes the unequal distribution of privilege and disadvantage by constructing race. This sleight of hand turns the aggressor’s action of domination and exploitation into perceived traits of the victim’s racial identity — a kind of “magic” that disguises systemic inequities by attributing them to supposedly inherent characteristics of racial groups. Racism conjures race, not the other way around: 

As the social alchemy of racecraft transforms racism into race, disguising collective social practice as inborn individual traits, so it entrenches racism in a category to itself, setting it apart from inequality in other guises. Racism and those other forms of inequality are rarely tackled together because they rarely come into view together. Indeed the most consequential of the illusions racecraft underwrites is concealing the affiliation between racism and inequality in general. Separate though they may appear to be, they work together and share a central nervous system.

We do not first have “race” and then “white/black” and “red,” with “yellow” and “brown” thrown in later. Rather slavery invents race to justify exploitation, designating some as temporary indenture and others as permanent chattel; and through the official apparatus of slave codes, race serves to entrench racial hierarchies and protect the political economic interests of slaveholders and elites. Even in the aftermath of slavery, the genius resides in manipulating racial designations through divide-and-conquer strategies to redirect dissatisfaction and, more worrisome, uprisings and revolution. Before anything else, race was a category of labor. Racial oppression and economic exploitation have always been entwined in capitalism, as insightfully and powerfully recognized by the Trinidadian-American sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox in his groundbreaking work Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948):

Sometimes, probably because of its very obviousness, it is not realized that the slave trade was simply a way of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting the great natural resources of America. This trade did not develop because Indians and Negroes were red and black, or because their cranial capacity averaged a certain number of cubic centimeters; but simply because they were the best workers to be found for the heavy labor in the mines and plantations across the Atlantic... This, then, is the beginning of modern race relations. It was not an abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups, but rather a practical exploitative relationship with its socio-attitudinal facilitation... As it developed and took definite capitalistic form, we could follow the white man around the world and see him repeat the process among practically every people of color. 

Too often, antiracist work narrowly emphasizes identity — prioritizing diversity, inclusion, representation, multiculturalism — while subordinating deeper questions of political economy. As a result, it fails to ask the critical questions, like exclusion from or inclusion for what? Predatory capitalism and a gig economy that offers no labor protections? A narrow identitarian framework that treats race as the cause of racism, rather than its consequence, reinforces the very category of race it seeks to dismantle. Racial identities are not standalone truths. They have always served as ideological cover for an underlying racial capitalism working to maintain hierarchies of labor and wealth. By narrowly focusing on identity without interrogating the structures that give it meaning, we obscure the actual interconnected determinants of systemic oppression. 
Does our current conversation on race and racism get us further or does it instead leave us cornered? Increasingly, the dominant identitarian framework, which narrowly treats identity as foundational for shared life, feels limited in its explanatory power.

It feels at once too easy (collapsing vital, wide-ranging conversations about our political economy into questions about personal identity) and too rigid (unable to account for how race operates within the broader complexities of racial capitalism). But without that wider context, we risk losing both moral clarity and strategic direction for actual change.

What if identity, when divorced from a wider liberative practice, actually stands in the way of liberation itself? What if identity is less about essential qualities that determine who belongs where and more about discovering how we are interconnected, in and through all our differences, and actually belong to one another? What if identity only arrives as an achievement from such shared struggle and solidarity, forged from revolutionary forms of love? What if the so-called race-class debate is a ruse grounded in notions of American exceptionalism, bewitching us into believing that unlike other nations shaped by class struggle, America is a case apart? That here, class exerts minimal influence compared to individual hard work and opportunity, while racial identity somehow bears the weight of history, exercising a singular and transhistorical axis of inequality? Witchcraft indeed. What is the discourse and prophetic vocabulary more capable of unveiling the interconnected roots of oppression and illuminating a way forward?