:Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism

Racial capitalism and firearm violence: Developing a theoretical framework for firearm violence research examining structural racism

Abstract: This introduction presents 'racial capitalism' as a timely and important avenue of study in contemporary French and Francophone Studies. Drawing inspiration from the belated French translation of Cedric Robinson's landmark Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition , it details early responses to Robinson's book on the francophone left, before engaging more broadly with the concept of racial capitalism in its more recent interpretations. Before detailing the issue's contributions, it argues that while work on race and racism in French and Francophone Studies is rich and expansive, work on racial capitalism remains to be developed.

The paper discusses empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on structurally and spatially ingrained racial capitalism, dispossession, and precarisation in what is identified as ‘neo-apartheid’ Sweden. Theoretically, the argument rests on a critical re-engagement of the notions of ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘neo-apartheid’ in contemporary critical research, inspired, historically, by rich research on racial capitalism in South Africa under apartheid. The argument is illustrated, empirically, by a scrutiny of processes of segregation, racial stigmatisation, and ‘the return of primitive accumulation’ reflected in predatory housing policies and super-exploitation of labour, conditioning livelihoods and opportunities of subaltern Others in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Through a local case in the region of Järvafältet in metropolitan Stockholm, the paper addresses subaltern struggles contesting these realities of racial capitalism in a society that used to be an international showpiece of social equality and inclusive diversity policy.

Racial capitalism has been an active terrain of political economy debate since the 1970s, but the last 5 years have seen a wider diffusion of the concept. We identify one modern component of racial capitalism that has seldom been discussed in extant work: the role of conservative economics at legitimating racial capitalist processes. To this end, we raise the following question: What does a narrative of support for racial capitalism look like in contemporary political economies, where racism denial is pervasive in political discourse, and trust in authorities are at an all-time low? We submit that narratives legitimating contemporary racial capitalism exist, but they are more subtle, indirect, and more plausibly deniable than the narratives that supported chattel slavery and the 100 years of Jim Crow that followed. The Civil Rights Era provided a legal basis for anti-discrimination efforts previously diluted by American jurisprudence and law. In this essay, we engage in a broader conversation about the intersections between discourse and structure before explicating exactly how conservative economics supports and reinforces racial capitalism. Explicating the components of this architecture is crucial to illustrating the value of racial capitalist approaches within the political economy canon.

Background/Context: For over three decades, Jean Anyon produced scholarship that revealed the deep-structural causes of educational inequality. Anyon’s work in political economy includes a racial analytic; she argues that access to education does not reduce economic disparities in urban communities of color, and that schools in poor and working-class communities of color in particular often serve to reproduce inequality across generations. It is common, however, for critical scholars analyzing educational inequality to be steeped in either Marxism or critical race theory, and less knowledgeable about the other. As a result, analyses rarely place equal emphasis on both theoretical frames or synthesize race and class. Using theories of racial capitalism to extend Anyon’s political economic analysis, we contend, brings forward conceptual tools and angles that capture the material and ideological work being done by current, highly racialized neoliberal restructuring in and beyond the school walls. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: We focus on the ways race operates as a material force that is part and parcel of the capitalist dynamics that create and require inequality, and argue that racial violence structures capitalist development, making the systematic impoverishment of urban schools and neighborhoods possible and permissible. First, we provide an overview of two key theories of racial capitalism from Cedric Robinson and Jodi Melamed. We then revisit Anyon’s work on school knowledge and the hidden curriculum to consider how these operate as forms of epistemic and psychic racial violence that (re)produce racial capitalist conditions. Next, we consider Anyon’s work on political economy and public policy in light of the ways neoliberal racial capitalism links the production of differential human value to capitalist development in urban neighborhoods, deploying public policies that limit the life chances of working class and poor youth of color. Finally, we consider the implications of these dynamics for the “radical possibilities” that inhere in urban schools, arguing that opposition to racial capitalism stretches Anyon’s formulation of the “radical” and the “possible,” as youth oppose racial capitalism by resisting the school itself. Research Design: In this theoretical article, we use theories of racial capitalism to analyze Anyon’s major works in urban education. Putting core concepts from these theories into conversation with Anyon’s findings and her own theorizations, we offer an analytical synthesis that braids together race and class to unpack the production of urban educational inequality. Conclusions/Recommendations: We propose that reading racial capitalism into Anyon’s work can extend her political economic analysis, and through such extension, her findings, analyses, and arguments can be leveraged to help us better understand how race and racism interlock with the ideologies, social structures, and chaos of capitalist development and neoliberal reform. We contend that such an analysis can build out both the “radical” and the “possible” with implications for how we think about opposition and organizing not just within but against schools.

Using C.L.R. James’ 1941 commentary Negroes, We Can Depend Only on Ourselves! and his his 1939 essay The Negro Question: Negroes and the War, Ornette D. Clennon traces James’ implicit use of racial contract theory to develop his conceptual framework of ‘racial capitalism’. Viewing class as a ‘structural’ function of race, as James does, usefully combines aspects of both Post-Colonial and Post-Marxian theories in a way that gives much needed agency to grass-roots community activism. Finally, Clennon shows the influence of James’ ‘racial capitalism’ on Pan Africanism and outlines the latter’s contemporary importance for community activism in black communities today.

This paper provides a critical intervention into recent geographical debates on racial capitalism, interrogating the role that Housing Associations (HAs), the main form of UK social housing, play in its (re)production. Housing Associations are institutional, third‐sector spaces within which novel forms of financialisation and bordering take place. Race is central to these processes, but insufficient critical attention has been afforded to the intersections of class, race, and migratory status in extant research on UK HAs. Moreover, existing research into housing and racial capitalism is provincial in its North American focus, typically examining home ownership and private renting. We argue this is a significant lacuna given that new and multiple forms of racialised exclusion, inequality, and extraction cohere in social housing. There is accordingly a pressing need for a robust interrogation of racial capitalisms through UK HAs, and of the role of HAs via the conceptual lens of racial capitalism. In concluding, the paper argues for a new focus on ‘actually existing’ racial capitalisms, and the need for detailed analyses of the logics and practices of racial capitalisms across a variety of sites and scales, helping debates move beyond their conceptual heartland in North America.

Lawyers, scholars, and activists have long sought to incorporate ecocide into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to address corporate and governmental impunity for massive and severe ecological damage, including the harms caused by climate change. This Article uses the framework of racial capitalism to examine and critique the proposed criminalization of ecocide. Coined by South African scholars and activists and refined by political theorist Cedric Robinson, the theory of racial capitalism offers valuable insights on the root causes of the climate crisis and the manifold injustices it inflicts on marginalized states and peoples. While most discussions of climate justice focus on the disproportionate impacts of climate change on those who contributed least to the problem, this Article examines the processes through which racial capitalism plunders the land, labor, and natural wealth of states and peoples racialized as inferior to generate profits for global elites. These processes immiserate most of the world’s population, subject marginalized communities to the “slow violence” of polluting industry, destabilize the planet’s ecosystems, generate prodigious quantities of greenhouse gases, and deprive subaltern populations of the resources needed to adapt to climate change and other socio-ecological crises. In other words, the fossil fuelbased capitalist world economy that caused the climate crisis was sparked and sustained by slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism (including its latest incarnation, neoliberalism). The Article highlights two core features of racial capitalism: its racial stratification of humans for the purpose of profit making and its eco-destructive logic. It explains international law’s complicity with these core features through legal doctrines that construct nature as property and justify the subordination of non-European peoples by portraying them as the backward and barbaric “other” who must be civilized through continuous economic, political, and military interventions. Applying these insights to the proposal to codify ecocide, the Article concludes that the proposed definition of ecocide may reinforce rather than subvert racial capitalism’s core features by (1) focusing on individual culpability and spectacular acts of ecological destruction while obscuring racial capitalism’s inherently predatory, eco-destructive logic; (2) perpetuating international law’s civilizing mission through the selective prosecution of the racialized “other”; and (3) devaluing nature, subaltern communities, and world views antithetical to racial capitalism through the incorporation of cost-benefit analysis into the definition of ecocide. Recognizing the interconnectedness of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and climate change, the Article calls for reparative and restorative forms of justice instead of punitive approaches that scapegoat individuals for the structural ills of racial capitalism.

There has been a large-scale migration of population from Northeastern states to India’s metropolitan cities and other regions in the past two decades under neo-economic policies, blurring the historical disjuncture between the perceived ‘mainland’ and the country’s Northeast. While this demonstrates social and economic mobility, recent literature has shown that such movements have also produced racial discrimination, labour exploitation, hostility and violence against perceived ‘others’ from the Northeast. Building on this literature, the paper explores how race, sexuality and labour intersect in soft skill industries, especially in spa centres, and examines how racial capital and racial capitalism work in complex and paradoxical forms while Northeasterners migrate internally in India. The paper brings forth the nuanced insight that even internal, domestic migration can entail the creation of racial capital, and migrants need not cross national borders for their raciality to be valued differently. By employing concepts of racial capital and racial capitalism side by side, it is shown that while the differentiation is animated through mobility, signifying the intra-Asian diversity, the neo-liberal economy simultaneously racialises the labour field where mobility is confronted by the experience of structured inequalities and everyday forms of violence and suffering.

‘Coming to terms with racial capitalism’ brings together three scholars from the disciplines of History, Geography, and Sociology to open up consideration of this increasingly popular concept. This is done by engaging the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ with the historical role of colonialism in Jamaica, Latin America, and Ireland. Each author draws on the resources of their discipline to locate the concept within debates such as Black Marxism and to consider it in relation to discussions about Indigenous rights and questions of racism. Catherine Hall offers a case study of one temporal and spatial instance of racial capitalism in the mid-18th-century Atlantic world. Sarah A. Radcliffe examines the place of Indigenous peoples in the racial colonial capitalism of Latin America. The final paper by Gurminder K. Bhambra argues for the significance of colonialism to understandings of capitalism through an examination of Irish colonial history.

This article attempts to think through the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and caste capitalism. It conceptualizes homocapitalism as immanent within the assemblage of homonationalism but also as becoming partially disembedded from it as a result of the shift in conjuncture from the “war on terror” to the “global financial crisis.” Having made a case for the partial autonomy of homocapitalism from homonationalism, the article explores the relationship between homocapitalism, racial capitalism, and the emergent theoretical conceptualization of caste capitalism. The author demonstrates how the central analytical insight of racial and caste capitalism—namely, that capitalism mobilizes precapitalist social hierarchies as a means of furthering accumulation—throws open the field for a range of ideological approaches that seek emancipation from racial and caste oppression through varying relationships with capitalism. This allows the author to make a crucial distinction between analytics and ideologies, a distinction that has been unhelpfully blurred in discussions of homocapitalism. As ideology, homocapitalism intensifies and derives some of its purchase from its affinities with discourses of liberatory capitalism such as Black capitalism and Dalit capitalism. As analytic, homocapitalism illuminates the fractioning of queerness in terms of its potential (ability, willingness) to contribute to production and social reproduction. Central to the comparison around which this article is structured is the illumination of racialization as a technology for the extraction and attribution of value that operates across racial capitalism, caste capitalism, and homocapitalism.

Dieser Artikel setzt sich mit der verbreiteten Kritik auseinander, Südafrika stelle auch im Post-Apartheid-Kontext weiterhin ein Paradebeispiel von „racial capitalism“ dar. Diese Kritik wird mit Verweis auf die anhaltende Vorherrschaft von Weißen bei Kontrolle und Management von Großunternehmen begründet, ungeachtet der im Kontext der Post-Apartheid verwirklichten Strategien von Black Economic Empowerment und „Employment Equity“. Hier wird die These vertreten, dass mit der Betonung der Kontinuitäten von „racial capitalism” in Südafrika das Ausmaß unterschätzt wird, in dem sich die Struktur des südafrikanischen Kapitalismus verändert hat: wie die Internationalisierung des „Großkapitals” dessen Beziehung zur schwarzen Arbeiter:innenschaft verändert hat, wie der Machtantritt des African National Congress die Beziehung zwischen Staat und Kapital verändert hat und wie die Veränderungen bei den Investitionsmustern (neben schwarzen Investitionen vor allem über Renten- und andere Investitionsfonds sowie vor allem Investitionen des chinesischen und indischen Finanzkapitals) den Charakter des „racial capitalism“ qualitativ verändert haben. Kurz, zwar weist die Wirtschaft Südafrikas im Post-Apartheid-Kontext nach wie vor ein starkes Ungleichgewicht zugunsten Weißer auf, doch hat der Übergang der politischen Macht von Weißen an einen überwiegend mit Schwarzen besetzten Staat in hohem Maß das Terrain verändert, auf dem sich der Kapitalismus nun zu bewegen hat. Ohne diese Veränderungen zu berücksichtigen, ist eine statische Vorstellung von „racial capitalism” nicht in der Lage, ein adäquates Bild des gegenwärtigen Südafrika zu zeichnen.

Social scientists have long debated whether racial inequality is an unfortunate consequence of political and economic exploitation or a core feature of capitalism. In 1983, Cedric Robinson synthesized these two opposing perspectives, calling the latter racial capitalism and demonstrating its theoretical viability. In recent years, scholars have increasingly employed Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism to explain a wide array of phenomena. Yet, urban sociology has not fully explored how racial capitalism changes and reshapes our core theoretical approaches. To begin to fill this gap, this special issue presents original papers that employ racial capitalism to extend, challenge, or refine theories of and methods for understanding cities and communities. In this introduction, we outline urban scholars’ historical explanations of racial inequality and provide an overview of the development and definition(s) of racial capitalism. We then summarize the papers included in this special issue and discuss a pathway forward for urban sociology.

Review Essay: Schoolrooms, Stages, and Scripts of Color-Based Slavery and Racial Capitalism - Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England By Urvashi Chakravarty. RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022; pp. 312, 25 illustrations. 64.95 e-book.

This intervention considers uneven development and social reproduction within racial capitalism. Social reproduction refers to the range of practices that form the conditions of possibility for the life of capital, as well as life and death within racial capitalism. This spans a range of institutions and networks within households, communities, states and across national borders as well as the labour practices, relations and organization that reproduce racial capitalism. Here, we examine the extraction of time, taking up theorizations across carceral geographies, postcolonial theory and Caribbean studies to demonstrate how coercive relations of social reproduction contribute to uneven development. In particular, we look at the role of the state in racial capital’s capture of reproductive activities across our work on electric utilities in Atlanta, Georgia and extralegal land tenure on Jamaica’s north coast. In bringing these distinct sites into conversation, we re-affirm the need to study uneven development by understanding how the circulation and accumulation of capital is imbricated with the production of hierarchies of all kinds of difference. We show how a conjunctural countertopography can reveal how state practices advance accumulation under conditions of widespread surplus lives, as capital wagers on captive life and premature death.