racecraft

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.
   • 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.1925 December, Earl Chapin May, “With Sande Up”, in Everybody's Magazine, volume 53, number 6, New York, NY: The Ridgway Company, page 149
   • 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.1947, Home Journal, volume 101, Hearst Corporation, page 1
2. The process by which racist behaviour creates the belief that race is a biological reality.
   • Fitting actual humans to any such grid inevitably calls forth the busy repertoire of strange maneuvering that is part of what we call racecraft.2012, Karen E. Fields, Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, Verso, published 2022, page 16
   • 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 ...2021, Stuart Earle Strange, chapter 6, in Suspect Others: Spirit Mediums, Self-Knowledge, and Race in Multiethnic Suriname, University of Toronto Press