Valorizing the Beach, Devaluing the People: Racial Capitalism and Coastal Development in Asbury Park, New Jersey

This Chapter maps the intertwinement, mutual construction, and dependence of ‘property’ and ‘race’ with each other. The discussion examines three dimensions of property which demonstrate the socio-cultural, material, and legal-political influences of property and race on each other, and several corresponding theoretical paradigms: (i) land (as understood through the so-called ‘Third World Approaches to International Law’ methodology and Indigenous Law), (ii) people/ labor (as understood through studies of ‘racial capitalism’), and (iii) the formulation of rights (as understood through Critical Race Theory and race-conscious property scholars). Throughout history, race and property have been indispensable to each other and have relied on each other’s supporting architecture. An appreciation of their interdependence reveals how racial hierarchy and separation have been normalised, how exercises of power including white supremacy have been invisibilised, and how racial disparities are still being perpetuated. In other words, it is through an examination of the original and recurring encounters between property and race that the power and inequity embedded in property itself can be revealed.

In conversation with Ferreras’s proposal for economic bicameralism, the current article makes the case for a more direct confrontation between conceptions of economic democracy and the realities of racial capitalism. In particular, it considers how efforts to expand power and voice for workers must contend with the racial hierarchy that marks the socioeconomic division of labor and the related use of racial distinctions to thwart labor solidarity. Focusing on the American context, the argument draws inspiration from the work and vision of two key figures in the unfinished struggle for Black liberation, W. E. B. Du Bois and Fannie Lou Hamer. After recapping core elements of Ferreras’s proposal, the article briefly examines the historical evolution of racial capitalism, starting with its roots in slavery and conquest. It then considers how movements agitating for greater worker power have intervened within this landscape. Against this backdrop, it draws lessons for how economic bicameralism might fit within a broader set of struggles that challenge racial capitalism as it exists today.

The Digital Calculus of Racial Capitalism

In response to the difficulties refugees face in finding housing, Berlin’s government has developed new housing-like shelters that offer longer-term accommodation. Drawing on literature concerning racial capitalism and urban migration governance, I explain how these shelters represent a multilayered business opportunity for revenue extraction, resulting in the ongoing displacement, spatial fixing, and continued racialization of refugees. Notably, I reveal the prominent roles of Berlin’s government, city-owned housing, and public real estate agencies. They use the construction of new refugee shelters in an entrepreneurial way in order to revitalize their own fiscal budgets, as well as to put urban land into production. This allows them to develop and then turn refugee shelters into substandard, racialized, and highly profitable forms of new urban housing for refugees and other racialized and low-income populations. Expounding the ways the building of accommodation as substandard urban housing leads to race-based pursuit of profit, I argue that refugee housing serves as an urban migration fix and is developed within the logic of racial capitalism. This article contributes to attempts to use racial capitalism as a framework to scrutinize urban and migration processes, helping us comprehend the distinctly racial logics of urban and migration governance, and housing precarity.

This article engages with the struggles of the ‘No Evictions Network’ (NEN) in Glasgow, a migrant- and activist-led organisation set up to resist the eviction of 300 asylum seekers by the multinational company Serco, which held a £1 billion-pound contract to provide housing to 17,000 asylum seekers in the UK. The NEN constituted the coming together of migrants’ and tenants’ struggles in the city. Drawing on the NEN’s experiences, the article highlights how the political economies of the border and the outsourcing of asylum accommodation create powerful ‘asylum corporate landlords’ (ACLs) like Serco. We position the emergence of such ACLs in debates around racial capitalism, housing financialisation and the carceral economies of migration to explore how they extract value from the disposability of racialised migrant populations. Building on this, we analyse how a shared housing crisis and the experiences of dispossession choreographing lives across different communities and tenants shaped a fertile ground for the articulation of tenants’ unions and migrant groups in Glasgow. We analyse these struggles through the lens of racial capitalism, highlighting the common grounds enabling their convergence, the novel practices developed and the challenges faced. Linking the emergence of ACLs with the NEN’s experiences, the article insists that the logics of racial capitalism not only perpetuate dispossession and disposability but are also met with multifaceted forms of solidarity making and collective agency.

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment.

Scripturalizing the Pandemic Jacqueline M. Hidalgo Anti-Blackness is a pandemic.1 Colonialism is a plague, capitalism is pandemic.2 In her analysis of California farmworker antipesticide campaigns in the 1960s, Laura Pulido describes how pesticides came to be “a metaphor for the larger power struggle.”3 Few imagined that farmworkers could band together and challenge how agribusiness functioned. Still, through contract negotiations, legal battles, public campaigns, and coalitions, some pesticides, most famously DDT, were banned. Now, in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has become a metaphor, or perhaps synecdoche, for the violence of racial capitalism.4 The pandemic has underscored how US racial capitalism as a structure of extraction is a form of collective violence that differentially devalues and fragments certain classes of people (and nonhuman nature) so that some are made more available to risk and exploitation.5 [End Page 625] The logics of racial capitalism also structure cultural norms such that we rarely question whether “value” is an appropriate metaphor for life. In the United States, African American and Native American communities have disproportionately suffered in the pandemic, with numbers of the sick and the dead far exceeding their portions of the US population, and ethnic Latinx/a/os have been disproportionately diagnosed with the disease.6 Meanwhile, by deporting detained migrants, the United States has helped spread COVID-19 to parts of Latin America.7 Since the early days of the pandemic in the United States, anti-Asian racism has displayed itself in aggressions targeting Asian American individuals and communities, even as Donald J. Trump’s administration has attempted to evade responsibility by labeling COVID-19 “Chinese.”8 Ekaputra Tupamahu dubbed this behavior “the perpetual foreigner virus” that “marginalizes Asian Americans.”9 Ageism and ableism also manifest in the ways that some sought to depict the virus as an irrelevant irritation that mostly harmed the elderly and those vulnerable through “pre-existing conditions,” as if some lives hold more “value” than others based on vulnerability.10 Too many of us who live in the United States know that racism is a preexisting condition.11 The epidemic of state-sanctioned murder and terrorization of Black [End Page 626] lives is not new as anti-Blackness pervades the past and present of the Americas and much of the world.12 The logics of exploitative domination that structure US racial capitalism have also structured the COVID-19 pandemic through hierarchal differentiations of ability, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. With the pandemic ongoing, protesters have taken to the streets to draw attention to the virulence of anti-Black racism. Since the pandemic has become a metaphor for racial violence, we also must think about how we can heal ourselves from that violence. Steven McDonald argues that protests, though temporarily increasing the risk of COVID-19, are the best “medicine” in the long run.13 More people in the United States than ever before seem to agree. Notably, more Euro-Americans have appeared at protests in support of Black rights than in the many demonstrations since 2014.14 As I finish drafting this reflection in mid-June, cities across the United States are declaring racism a “public health crisis.”15 Biblical scholars are not strangers to the power and perils of metaphors, especially medical metaphors.16 Prominent in this time of pandemic has been a revisioning of the book of Revelation and its imaginative legacies. Alongside some intriguing allusions to the four horsemen (Rev 6), particularly pestilence, a different strain of apocalypticism has risen.17 Instead of fantasies of the end of the world, some public intellectuals turn toward apocalyptic frames as a source for hopeful [End Page 627] revelation and possible transformation.18 Reflections on the current apocalypse respond to a crisis in meaning, where colonizing narratives of domination no longer obscure unjust violence. Many minoritized biblical critics study what we study precisely because we know well the masks of dominant myths and the power that minoritized communities have found in subverting those myths. As David A. Sánchez argued, subverting Rome’s myths plays a central role in shaping the Apocalypse’s intertextual play, and then, as Revelation becomes central to the myths undergirding modern Spanish...

This article examines how racial capitalism intersects with platform capitalism through the rise of rental platforms and corporate landlords in the post-apartheid housing market. Combining 18 months of fieldwork in Cape Town with the spatial analysis of sales and longitudinal census data, I demonstrate how rental platforms enabled the consolidation of the private rental sector and the emergence of corporate landlords through the classification of tenants centered upon credit scoring. To automate tenant screening solutions, rental platforms leveraged and extended the information dragnet knitted by credit bureaus. This dragnet of unprecedented depth and volume is built upon the infrastructures and devices that enabled the for-profit, racial classification of people, housing and neighborhoods during colonialism and apartheid, notably ID numbers. In the context of racialized indebtedness and housing inequalities engineered by racial property regimes, the use of platforms to sort the “good” from the “bad” tenant and manage rental portfolios shifts mechanisms of segregation and reproduces racialized patterns of capital accumulation across the post-apartheid city. The article argues that rental platforms extend the extractive logic of racial capitalism through two joint rentier mechanisms: the transformation of rental housing into a new asset class; the extraction and assetization of rental data.

Part 2 of RM’s interview with historian Robin D. G. Kelley—“Solidarity is Not a Market Exchange”—picks up in detail on Kelley’s indebtedness to, and understanding of Cedric Robinson’s concept of “racial capitalism.” This part of the interview also covers Kelley’s use of the Marxian/Hegelian notion of “contradiction;” the intellectual and activist traditions that most influenced Kelley’s thinking; Kelley’s take on scholars of historical black radical movements in America; Kelley’s conceptions of race and racism; his and Robinson’s critique of Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation and the types of exploitation Marx thought important or not; Kelley’s use and criticism of “utopia;” economic and social struggles within universities; Kelley’s position on the Althusserian Benin theorist, Paulin Hountandji, and the notions of African “ethnophilosophy” and “unanism;” and Kelley’s view of the efficacy, or not, of “diaspora” to describe the condition of black communities in the U.S. and abroad.

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

Quantico, an American thriller television series aired on the ABC, begins with the aftermath of an explosion: Grand Central Station in New York City has been razed to the ground in a terrorist attack. Mobility and the production of cultural and racial difference have long been intimately related and, in contexts of contemporary capitalism, the hypermediation of difference is co-implicated with the entrenchment of neoliberal multiculturalism and late-capitalist mutations of cosmopolitanism. Brand Chopra exemplifies how discourses of racial difference structure the production of value in capitalism. Displaced onto multicultural difference and cosmopolitanism, inequalities of race emerge as structuring forces in the consolidation of the security state and racial capitalism. Labor arbitrage is a prerequisite for outsourcing to be profitable for transnational and multinational companies and becomes a process of racialization when it is based on a calculus according to which the labor and time of workers in the Global South are undervalued.

This chapter applies critical consciousness and identity-based motivation theories to understand youth of color’s psychological experiences in the face of oppression and the processes by which they can negotiate and challenge their conditions. Critical consciousness and identity-based motivation theories explicate how inequality shapes psychological processes and how these processes can either perpetuate or serve to challenge inequality. We also draw on the framework of racial capitalism – which posits that contemporary global capitalism emerged out of racial hierarchy – to contextualize the barriers youth of color traverse in their pursuit of social mobility. A racial capitalism analysis highlights the injustices youth of color contend with. We first provide overviews of the context of racial capitalism, identity-based motivation, and critical consciousness independently, and then we highlight the overlap between identity-based motivation and critical consciousness within the context of US racial capitalism. This synthesis helps to clarify how youth experience and navigate injustice by leveraging insights from both identity-based motivation and critical consciousness to illuminate the mechanisms that either thwart or promote their healthy development.

The alarm and anxiety unleashed by the Great Recession found fascinating expression across popular culture. Harried survivors negotiated societal collapse among zombies in The Walking Dead. Middle-class whites crossed the literal and metaphorical Mexican border on Breaking Bad or coped with a lack of freedom among the marginalized on Orange Is the New Black. Camilla Fojas uses representations of people of color, the incarcerated, migrants, and trans/queers--vulnerable populations all--to explore the contradictions created by the economic crisis and its freefalling aftermath. Television, film, advertising, and media coverage of the crisis created a distinct kind of story about capitalism and the violence that supports it. Fojas shows how these pop culture moments reshaped social dynamics and people's economic sensibilities and connects the ways pop culture reflected economic devastation. She examines how racial capitalism persists through the proliferation of diverse forms of racial domination and non-European imperialism in the neoliberal era. Racial hierarchies are supplemented by other typologies, ones that are racialized but contain different symbolic capacities, particularly that between migrant or refugee or displaced person and citizen and global North and global South. Zombies, Migrants, and Queers shows how racial capitalism creates new tributaries of oppression in its neoliberal imperial form.

This article examines the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and violence in Sri Lanka through the combined lenses of international economic law (IEL) and transitional justice. We argue that colonialism instantiates vicious cycles in the histories of violence of ethno-racial capitalism through the creation of states with debts that can never be repaid. This system of ‘indebted impunity’ persists even under ‘new’ Southern sovereigns. We illustrate how IEL and transitional justice are co-constitutive in maintaining international law’s racial hierarchies, while pursuing the construction of racial hierarchies that precipitate ethno-racial capitalist formations, and violence, in Sri Lanka. We first attend to the emergence of international law with racial capitalism as a story of sustained violence, where offshoots like IEL and transitional justice remain tied to the foundational violence in ways that cannot be reformed away. The final section examines the colonial transformation of Sri Lanka, focusing on the British Empire’s role in configuring ethno-racial communities, to consider how IEL and transitional justice work together to maintain this cycle. We observe that indebted impunity persists as a structural condition even when the ‘white’ colonial masters have formally departed, and ‘brown’ differentially racialized compatriots become the ones in charge.

White supremacy is a racial order that relies on a presumed “natural” superiority of whiteness and assigns to all groups racialized as non-white biological or cultural characteristics of inferiority. Despite decades of scientific studies refuting these claims, beliefs in racial difference continue to rely on ideas of innate or genetic differences between groups. Scholars now widely agree that race is a social, cultural, and political distinction that was and continues to be forged through relations of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. A focus on white supremacy does not limit scholars to the study of white supremacists, that is, those individuals and groups that outwardly espouse a racial order that privileges whiteness and white people and frequently endorse physical violence to maintain this order. Under white supremacy, societies privilege whiteness even in the absence of explicit laws and sometimes while promoting ideologies of racial inclusion and equality. Contexts of white supremacy feature the consolidation of white power and wealth at the expense of people of color—an arrangement that is maintained through racial capitalism, settler colonialism, anti-blackness, imperial conquest, Islamophobia or anti-Muslim racism, and xenophobic or anti-immigrant sentiment. Widespread awareness of linguistic difference can be mobilized to support these pillars of white supremacy through a range of official language policies and overt acts of linguistic suppression, as well as more covert or subtle language practices and ideologies. While the term “white supremacy” has gained broader circulation in the 21st century, these topics have been studied by linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists for decades under the more familiar headings of “race and language,” “racism and language,” and “raciolinguistics.” This scholarship examines how racial domination is consolidated, maintained, and justified through attention paid to language, but also the ways that marginalized speakers take up a broad range of linguistic practices to challenge assumptions about the superiority of whiteness and emphasize non-white racial pride, community ties, and cultural and linguistic heritage and traditions. Racial and linguistic hierarchies work together to falsely connect whiteness and the use of “standard” (officially sanctioned) language with rationality, intelligence, education, wealth, and higher status. Under these racial logics, speakers of languages associated with non-whiteness are readily linked to danger, criminality, a lack of intelligence or ability, primitivism, and foreignness. Together these ideologies naturalize connections between languages or specific linguistic practices and types of people, producing the conditions under which racialized speakers experience discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, oppression, and violence. At the same time, speakers challenge these power dynamics through linguistic practices that range from codeswitching, bilingualism and multilingualism, and language revitalization efforts, to verbal traditions both old and new, including social media genres. Though racial hierarchy continues to be bolstered by a linguistic hierarchy that assigns higher value to English as well as other European or colonial languages, linguistic variation persists, as speakers proudly embrace linguistic practices that defy the push to assimilate or submit to language loss. Beliefs in the superiority of whiteness have global resonance, but local specificities are important, and a majority of research has thus far been conducted within the context of the United States. Scholars who study language, racial inequality, and oppression continue to weigh in on public policies and debates in an attempt to raise awareness on these issues and advocate for racial and social justice.