Introduction: What Does Racial Capitalism Have to Do With Cities and Communities?

Embedding Racial Justice and Advancing Health Equity at the American Medical Association

This article investigates the 2012 Marikana massacre as a lens through which to understand the persistence of racial and migrant inequalities in post-apartheid South Africa. Despite the formal dismantling of apartheid, systemic socioeconomic disparities remain deeply entrenched, particularly within extractive labour sectors. The massacre exemplifies how democratic promises have failed to dismantle racialized structures of economic exploitation and exclusion. Focusing on the concepts of racial capitalism and deportability, this study analyzes how racial and immigration status function as intersecting mechanisms of marginalization. Through theoretical synthesis and critical review of secondary literature and policy analysis, this study explores how Black and migrant workers are simultaneously devalued and disciplined by state and corporate interests. The findings demonstrate that racial inequality is sustained through exploitative labour relations, institutional violence, and unequal access to public services, while migrant workers face added layers of legal precarity, xenophobic exclusion, and social invisibility. These overlapping systems create a structural configuration in which Black migrant workers remain especially vulnerable. The article concludes that addressing these injustices requires policy frameworks that confront racialized capitalism and protect migrant labour rights, thereby fostering a more equitable and inclusive social order in contemporary South Africa.

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.

This article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement’s (BLM) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-Black oppression. Taking a cue from BLM, I argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue duree framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. I begin by revealing how neo-Marxist and neo-Foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of David Harvey and Wendy Brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. Such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. In contrast, I then trace how the Movement for Black Lives policy platform invokes Cedric Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. Building on BLM’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, I finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. By historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. It also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the American left.

Urban climate resilience under racial capitalism: Governing pluvial flooding across Amsterdam and Dhaka

This article employs the theoretical concept of racial capitalism as an intellectual framework with which to theorise and explain racialised inequality in South Africa. Historical evidence shows that the accumulation of Whiteness in South Africa has historically been inseparable from the accumulation of capital. This work illustrates that the African National Congress (ANC) used the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to launder and legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. It identifies Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as one of the ANC government’s economic laundering schemes that it employs to legitimise racial capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa. I use the insight of scholars such as Marzia Milazzo to conclude that, as a full-blown laundered discourse, racial capitalism allows a White middle class to continue to own and manage the means of production and intergenerational wealth, while a Black middle class continues to endure intergenerational poverty and dispossession.

The papers in this special issue engage Black radical intellectual ideas to highlight the related concepts of anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. As such, these works challenge white supremacy in scholarship and beyond by providing case studies, interviews, essays, and theoretical explorations that center Black liberational thought and radical Black knowledge-making. Underpinning these efforts, is a commitment to challenge anti-Blackness in management and organization studies. Anti-Blackness is an organized and stubborn form of racism that targets Black communities by removing or denying their full humanity. In our introduction, we discuss the relationship between anti-Blackness and racial capitalism, and suggest that these are critical concepts for scholars of management and organization to meaningfully engage with. Racial capitalism has rapidly emerged over the last 10 years as a significant analytic of race and its materiality as a socioeconomic formation. We write this introduction to offer deeper insights into this concept and how its foundational ideas can be applied to current debates in the organization of scholarship, public policy, and corporate activity. Specifically, the special issue highlights the role of context and positionality in the formation of capitalism and urges scholars and activists to pay greater attention to how our analysis of race and capitalism must retain a focus on specific mechanisms and arrangements that shape these relations.

Announcements

The introduction to this special issue takes up the narrations and values produced by the travels of words like queer of color, race, and racial capitalism to both comobilize and retheorize queer of color critique and the content and contours of global racial capitalism. With and beyond the story of US empire and the transatlantic slave trade—from peripheral European engagements with Africa to the circulation of caste in Africa via Indian Ocean worlds—in this special issue the authors examine some of the histories and present modes of capitalist accumulation that are relevant to telling global stories of race and capitalism. A queer/trans lens keeps the authors’ attention trained as well on the arrangements and estrangements of the sex/gender systems that power such narratives of race and capitalism. So positioned, the authors enter ongoing debates on the geopolitics of queer studies, the import of queer materialism, and theorizations of racial capitalism by asking (1) What is the “racial” of racial capitalism?, and (2) What is the “of color” in queer/trans of color critique? The questions form a method for thinking global racial capitalism and queer/trans of color study together—what the authors call transnational queer materialism.

The battle for the boardwalk: Racial formations in a segregated coastal resort

Racial inequalities in health: Framing future research

Racial capitalism is a fundamental cause of the racial and socioeconomic inequities within the novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) in the United States. The overrepresentation of Black death reported in Detroit, Michigan is a case study for this argument. Racism and capitalism mutually construct harmful social conditions that fundamentally shape COVID-19 disease inequities because they (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. Interventions should address social inequality to achieve health equity across pandemics.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

There are important calls for greater inclusion of Indigenous and racialised communities in oral microbiome research. This paper uses the concept of racial capitalism (the extractive continuity of colonialism) to critically examine this inclusion agenda. Racial capitalism explicitly links capitalist exploitations with wider social oppressions e.g., racisms, sexism, ableism. It is not confined to the commercial sector but pervades white institutions, including universities. By using the lens of racial capitalism, we find inclusion agendas allow white institutions to extract social and economic value from relations of race. Racially inclusive research is perceived as a social good, therefore, it attracts funding. Knowledge and treatments developed from research create immense value for universities and pharmaceutical companies with limited benefits for the communities themselves. Moreover, microbiome research tends to drift from conceptualisations that recognise it as something that is shaped by the social, including racisms, to one that is determined genetically and biologically. This location of problems within racialised bodies reinforces racial oppressions and allows companies to further profit from raciality. Inclusion in oral microbiome research must consider ways to mitigate racial capitalism. Researchers can be less extractive by using an anti-racism praxis framework. This includes working with communities to co-design studies, create safer spaces, giving marginalised communities the power to set and frame agendas, sharing research knowledges and treatments through accessible knowledge distributions, open publications, and open health technologies. Most importantly, inclusion agendas must not displace ambitions of the deeper anti-oppression social reforms needed to tackle health inequalities and create meaningful inclusion.

In Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism, Mingwei Huang traces the development of new forms of racial capitalism in the twenty-first century. Through fieldwork in one of the “China malls” that has emerged along Johannesburg’s former mining belt, Huang identifies everyday relations of power and difference between Chinese entrepreneurs and African migrant workers in these wholesale shops. These relations, Huang contends, replicate and perpetuate global structures of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, and colonialism, even when whiteness is not present. Huang argues that this dynamic reflects the sedimented legacies and continued operation of white supremacy and colonialism, which have been transformed in the shift of capitalism’s center of gravity toward China and the Global South. These new forms of racial capitalism and empire layer onto and extend histories of exploitation and racialization in South Africa. Taking a palimpsestic approach, Huang offers tools for understanding this shift and decentering contemporary Western conceptions of race, empire, and racial capitalism in the Chinese Century.