racecraft

English

Etymology

From race +‎ -craft.

Noun

racecraft (uncountable)

1. The total of a racer's skill (craft) along dimensions including: practicing, qualifying, starts, beginning, mid-race and end-race pace, passing, wear equipment usage, and pit strategy.
   • 1925 December, Earl Chapin May, “With Sande Up”, in Everybody's Magazine‎^[1], volume 53, number 6, New York, NY: The Ridgway Company, page 149:

     That same year he brought Bracadale up the stretch, to win by two lengths in the 1924 Withers. Both wins were credited to [Earl] Sande's racecraft. Sande's career is illuminated by many such victories. But it hasn't always been easy going for Sande.

   • 1947, Home Journal‎^[2], volume 101, Hearst Corporation, page 1:

     Those boys just don't make any mistakes at all, and their flawless technique is so habitual, so ingrained, that they can concentrate all their effort on points of super-racecraft, little things that save a fifth of a second here and another there.

   • 1964, William F. Nolan, Charles Beaumont, When engines roar‎^[3], New York, NY: Bantam Books, page 126:

     Here, in 1951, Ascari demonstrated the high order of racecraft he commanded when, with a small lead over his old rival Fangio, he calmly drew into the pits before his last lap. The Ferrari team was frantic. Ascari wanted the tires changed before committing himself to that long (14-mile) last lap rather than risk failure.

2. The process by which racist behaviour creates the belief that race is a biological reality.
   • 2012, Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life‎^[4], Verso, published 2022, page 16:

     Fitting actual humans to any such grid inevitably calls forth the busy repertoire of strange maneuvering that is part of what we call racecraft.

   • 2021, Stuart Earle Strange, chapter 6, in Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname‎^[5], University of Toronto Press:

     Racecraft hijacks often minor human physical and cultural differences and weaponizes them into symptoms of race – an invisible substance that is held to account for inborn moral and physical disparities between racialized populations ...

   • 2022, Jarrod Shanahan, “Every Fire Needs a Little Bit of Help”, in Endnotes‎^[6]:

     America’s contemporary racecraft is doubly pernicious as political traditions like “identity politics,” which originated in the context of class struggle as a recognition of real and dynamic differentials of experience structured by capitalist exploitation, have become counter-insurgent reifications of difference, and comfortably at home in the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, which uses its jargon to attach the left.