Racial capitalism

Painting by Eyre Crowe, A Slave Sale in Charleston, South Carolina, 1854

Racial capitalism is a concept coined by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983. It describes the process of extracting social and economic value from a person of a different racial identity, typically a person of color; however, a person of any race might engage in racial capitalism, as might an institution dominated by one particular race. Robinson, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism was inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. In fact, he states that capital "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups." Therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value," according to Robinson.

Prior to Robinson's coining of the concept, early scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Eric Williams demonstrated that industrial capitalism was built on a foundation of colonialism and slavery in their works. Furthermore, Black radicals in American sociology such as Du Bois, St. Claire Drake, Horace Cayton, and Oliver Cromwell Cox established a foundation for academic research on the intersection of racism and capitalism.

In modern academic literature, racial capitalism has been discussed in the context of social inequities, ranging from environmental justice issues to disparities in COVID-19 contraction rates.

Term origin

Robinson's articulations of racial capitalism, in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, were central to the emerging field of Black and diasporic African studies, wherein new connections were drawn between capitalism, racial identity, and the development of the disconnected social consciousness—that is, the discontinuity of interhuman relations—in the 20th-century. In Robinson's own words: "the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions," and "it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism." Building upon earlier examinations of racial discrimination in and inherent to various political ideologies and societal structures, Robinson challenged the Marxist notion of capitalism's negation of the basic discriminatory tenets of European feudalism, namely, its rigid caste system and reliance upon multi-generational serfdom. Hence, rather than considering capitalism as revolutionary and radically liberating, as, say, Michael Novak did, Robinson argued the inverse: that capitalism did not liberate those in racially oppressive positions, nor did it abolish feudalism's discriminatory practices; instead, capitalism gave rise to a new world order, one that extended—not deconstructed—such discriminatory practices, and one that developed and became intertwined with various forms of racial oppression: "slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide." Although racial capitalism is not limited to European territories or those previously under Europe's colonial or imperial rule, it was during Western Europe's 17th-century economical and intellectual flourishing that capitalism and racial exploitation were first linked. Racial capitalism, according to Robinson, therefore emanated from the "tendency of European civilization...not to homogenize [groups of peoples] but to differentiate"—differentiation which led to racial hierarchization and, consequently, exploitation, expropriation, and expatriation.

History

This folk art model of a slave ship was made by an unknown artist in the first half of the 20th century and is on display at the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

Historically, from the 17th-century colonization of Virginia to Victorian Britain and beyond, elites used race as a means to stratify society, and then subsequently exploited racial division in pursuit of accumulating capital.

English colonization was in large part driven by the economic decline of feudalism, the decline of which was hastened by events such as the Black Death, famines, and wars in as early as the 14th century. Such decline created a crisis of capital accumulation, which resulted in class struggles undermining the feudal system and elites looked to colonization to maintain wealth and power. The fusion of race and capitalism first materialized in the modern epoch with the advent of the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th-century. Though slavery existed for thousands of years prior to the conquest of the Americas and the commodification of Africans (e.g. classical Greek and Roman supply chains were heavily reliant upon slave labor), racism and its convergence with capital, as it is understood today, emerged concurrently with the oceanic trade routes in the 1600s. The transatlantic voyage of Northern European explorers to the New World, unlike the conquests of Spanish conquistadors, which yielded significant deposits of gold, silver, and other valuable metals, was subsidized primarily through agricultural plantations. In 1619, the first group of African laborers were brought to Virginia, coinciding with when tobacco farming was established. However, cash crop agriculture in European colonies was serviced chiefly by white indentured servants in its inception, and it was not until the sixteen-sixties and seventies that servitude was formally institutionalized into slavery. These indentured servants, mostly indebted or imprisoned European immigrants, worked under a plantation owner for a set period of time, usually for four to seven years, before they obtained 'free man' status. As plantations expanded, workloads surged, and indentured servitude terms expired, white American colonists searched for more sustainable means of economical, unrestricted employment to meet growing demand and ever-increasing profit quotas.

In 1661 the Barbados Slave Code was signed into law, serving as a basis for the Caribbean (Barbados, specifically) slave trade. On paper the legislation protected both the slave and the slave master from heinous cruelty, however, in effect, only the latter party received lawful security. Owners were provided with various methods to keep slaves in-line, and by law were proffered legal intervention if slaves pursued retaliation or a collective insurrection, whereas the latter was excluded from pursuing legal recourse in the case of cruelty or maltreatment. During this time, citizens of color lived amongst the colonies, some of which even enjoyed state-protected freedom. In one account, the Chesapeake Bay, was described as having a multiracial character in the early to mid 1600s.

However, in the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, during which farmers, white and African indentured servants, African slaves, and former indentured servants joined forces in armed rebellion against Governor William Berkeley in Virginia, racial stratification emerged to prevent future coalitions between Black and white laborers. By privileging white laborers and enslaving Black people for life, colonial authorities created a system to separate out different races within the laboring population, using color as a sorting mechanism. In the 1680s, categories of "English" and ‘Negro," as well as the related categorizations of ‘white’ and ‘Black’ emerged.

Furthermore, the slave trade developed the racialized conception of property in several ways, especially in the United States. One such way was through classifying people in the property scheme. Specifically, property ownership was dependent on race, and only white men maintained the right to own property—property which included white and non-white men alike. Whiteness, for the property-owning subset of white men, therefore, enabled ownership of property along with insulation from the threat of becoming property oneself. Under the yoke of chattel slavery, and subject to its brutal practices, slaves (and, by extension, men and women of color more broadly) were dehumanized, i.e., reduced to subhuman status.

More than a century later, imperial Britain faced similar challenges to those faced by colonial Virginia, which emanated from the struggle with containing an insurgent multi-ethnic working class that threatened the class system and seemingly disrupted the smooth accumulation of capital. Long-existing class struggles in conjunction with the circulation of radical ideas from the French Revolution, resulted in explosive demands from the working class which undermined the interests of social elites with regards to industrial capitalism. Ultimately, class racism and the racialization of intellectual thought, along with repression, deportation, and violence perpetuated the subjugation of the working class while stratifying it along racial lines.

Modern racial capitalism

Racial capitalism has been theorized by academic scholars to be at the core of many issues involving racial inequality, including environmental justice issues, the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19, as well as the South African apartheid and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Charisse Burden-Stelly, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues in an article for the socialist Monthly Review that "modern U.S. racial capitalism [emphasis in the original] [is] a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination, and labor superexploitation. She further argues that is is rooted in the intersection of anti-Blackness and anti-radicalism. Burden-Stelly describes Anti-Blackness as reducing Blackness to "a category of abjection and subjection" through means such as claims of "absolute biological or cultural difference, ruling-class monopolization of political power, negative and derogatory mass media propaganda, [and] the ascent of discriminatory legislation..." She defines anti-radicalism as the "repression and condemnation of anticapitalist and/or left-leaning ideas, politics, practices, and modes of organizing that are construed as subversive, seditious, and otherwise threatening to capitalist society. These include, but are not limited to, internationalism, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, peace activism, and antisexism." Burden-Stelly uses the work of Trinidadian-born sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox to argue that "[m]odern US racial capitalism arose in the context of the First World War, when, as Cox explains, the United States took advantage of the conflict to capture the markets of South America, Asia, and Africa for its 'over-expanded capacity.'" In the context of the First Red Scare, Burden-Stelly notes that a 1919 US Justice Department report named Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications condemned Blacks' "'ill-governed reaction toward race rioting,' 'threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching,' open demand for social equality, identification with the Industrial Workers of the World, and 'outspoken advocacy of the Bolshevik or Soviet doctrine.'" Burden-Stelly situates the critique of racial capitalism as developed by Cedric Robinson within an early- and mid-20th-century tradition of Black radical critique whose major practitioners included, among others, W. E. B. Du Bois, James W. Ford, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, Esther Cooper Jackson, Walter Rodney, and James Boggs.

Environmental justice

Environmental justice scholars in the United States have argued in modern literature that systems of racial capitalism and settler colonialism allow for environmental injustices to occur today. More specifically, environmental racism is a specific form of environmental injustice that "frequently includes the implementation of policies, regulations, or institutional practices that target communities of color for undesirable waste sites, zoning, and industry." According to environmental justice scholars and activists, examples of environmental racism practiced by the United States federal and state governments include the prison system, where people of color and undocumented persons are the majority of inmates and detainees who suffer disproportionate health risk and harms, and toxic exposures such as the Flint water crisis.

Environmental justice scholars such as Laura Pulido, Department Head of Ethnic Studies and Professor at the University of Oregon, and David Pellow, Dehlsen and Department Chair of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, argue that recognizing environmental racism as an element stemming from the entrenched legacies of racial capitalism is crucial to the movement, with white supremacy continuing to shape human relationships with nature and labor.

Pulido argues for the reframing of the environmental justice movement by conceptualizing environmental racism as a product of racial capitalism. She outlines three main points: the centrality of the production of social difference in creating value, the incorporation of the devaluation of nonwhite bodies into economic processes, and the state's active sanctioning of racial violence in the form of death and degraded bodies and environments. In a specific example, Pulido contends that racial capitalism is at the core of the Flint water crisis: "the people of Flint are so devalued that their lives are subordinated to the goals of municipal fiscal solvency...this devaluation is based on both their blackness and their surplus status, with the two being mutually constituted."

In his work, Pellow describes how the pervasive legacies of European colonization of Indigenous land in the United States continue to shape the experiences that Indigenous people and other minority communities have with their environments. He asserts that deep-rooted racial hierarchies underlie the American legal system and allow for the widespread environmental racism that these communities have faced over centuries. An example of environmental racism Pellow cites is a study by the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz which reveals the disproportionate exposures to industrial toxic releases, cancer risks, and respiratory hazards from pollution experienced by communities of color and low-income residents in the San Francisco Bay Area. The study's authors suggest that understanding power dynamics is crucial in analyzing patterns of environmental racism; according to this perspective, areas where communities of color and low-income residents are unable to resist and affect regional politics are where environmental hazards end up.

COVID-19 disparities

Racial disparities in the public health and socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19 have also been attributed to racial capitalism. Whitney Laster Pirtle, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Merced, argues in her article that the social conditions developed by racial capitalism:

(a) shape multiple diseases that interact with COVID-19 to influence poor health outcomes; (b) affect disease outcomes through increasing multiple risk factors for poor, people of color, including racial residential segregation, homelessness, and medical bias; (c) shape access to flexible resources, such as medical knowledge and freedom, which can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease; and (d) replicate historical patterns of inequities within pandemics, despite newer intervening mechanisms thought to ameliorate health consequences.

A key case study Pirtle uses to exemplify the role of racial capitalism in COVID-19 health disparities is the overrepresentation in mortality among Black Americans in Detroit, Michigan. Public health statistics reveal that 40% of COVID-19 deaths are those of Black residents in a state where only 14% of the population is Black. According to Pirtle, this disparity is caused by structural violence resulting from an racial capitalist system. She describes how racial capitalism influences multiple disease factors and increases multiple disease risk factors through racial residential segregation, which is initiated and perpetuated by underlying racism in legislative and economic institutions through governmental housing policies, and ultimately enforced by the judicial system. Studies show that racial residential segregation causes minority communities to have decreased access to green spaces and healthy, affordable foods, as well as increased exposure to environmental toxins and hazards, which inhibit healthy behaviors while also forcing communities of color to live in harmful physical and social environments and experience increased stressful events. Thus, multiple risk factors shape health, including COVID-19. Specifically in Detroit, a study by health researchers at the University of Michigan argues that racial and spatial relations like racial residential segregation are fundamental determinants of health. Mapping data indicates that Detroit is one of most segregated cities in the United States, supporting the argument that families of color in Detroit face increased risk for COVID-19 impacts due to increased risk factors resulting from racial residential segregation. Moreover, Pirtle argues that racial capitalism restricts minority communities' access to resources such as quality healthcare, which wealthy, white residents are better able to access due to societal privileges.

South African apartheid and Arab-Israeli conflict

Racial capitalism, though primarily discussed in the context of the United States in modern literature, is theorized to be a global system. Apartheid in South Africa as well as the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict has been attributed to racial domination and capital accumulation. According to Andy Clarno, the author of Neoliberal Apartheid: Palestine/Israel and South Africa After 1994, two key aspects of capitalism are accumulation by dispossession and coercive labor regimes, which constitute strategies implemented by settler colonial powers in South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Clarno also cites Saskia Sassen's Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy in explaining that "global capitalism today operates through a 'logic of expulsion' that increasingly dispossesses people of jobs, homes, lands, and welfare benefits." He further argues that forced dispossession of racially devalued people's land and resources is a constant, racialized process of capital accumulation, and forms of labor exploitation such as slavery, sharecropping, indentured servitude, debt peonage, convict labor, and sweatshops are also integral features of capitalism. Moreover, racial capitalist strategies often implement exclusionary protection to reserve jobs for privileged groups. According to Clarno, in South Africa and Palestine/Israel, deracialized neoliberal capitalism was framed as crucial to decolonization by facilitating the democratization of the South African state and the development of an independent Palestinian state. However, in reality, Clarno argues that restructuring has led to "partial decolonization in South Africa and a continuation of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel; a rearticulation of the relationship between race and class within contexts of expanding inequality and racialized poverty; and an increasing reliance on violence to police the racialized poor and secure the powerful."

Critiques

Critics of Robinson's conceptualization of racial capitalism mainly question the connection between race and capitalism as well as whether such a connection is necessary, and also critique the clarity and basis of existing literature on racial capitalism.

Julian Go, Professor of Sociology at University of Chicago, highlights three tensions in the theory of racial capitalism: "(1) whether “race” as opposed to other forms of difference is the primary mode of differentiation in capitalism, (2) whether deficiencies in existing theory warrant the new concept “racial capitalism,” and (3) whether the connection between race and capitalism is a contingent or logical necessity." Go argues that the term "racial capitalism" refers generally to relationships between racial inequality and capitalism, but current literature does not specify a single set of causal relations or connections between them; thus the concept of racial capitalism does not accurately reflect a sociological theory.

Another similar critique by anthropologists Michael Ralph and Maya Singhal evaluates existing literature on racial capitalism, maintaining that the terms "race" and "capitalism" are rarely delineated and that some scholars use racial capitalism to view Black subjectivity as a debilitated condition and treat slavery as an abject status specific to capitalism while failing to provide sufficient theoretical or historical justification.

See also

• Class conflict
• History of capitalism
• History of capitalist theory
• Racial equality
• Settler colonialism
• Slave Trade
• Social equality