Memes

It is my intention to suggest that Americans, including many historians, tend to accord race a transhistorical, almost metaphysical, status that removes it from all possibility of analysis and understanding. Ideologies, including those of race, can be properly analyzed only at a safe distance from their terrain. To assume, by intention or default: that race is a phenomenon outside history, is to take a position within the terrain of racialist ideology and to become its unknowing -and therefore uncontesting- victim. (Barbara Fields, Ideology and Race in American History)