Racial Capital Research Articles

Fight the Power? How Black Adults’ Racial Capital Associates With Their Political Activities

Systemic racism explains historical and contemporary anti-black exclusion, violence, and exploitation in the United States. Yet, Black people routinely resist systemic racism’s effects. This study asks whether racial capital (i.e., Blacks’ belief in the significance of systemic racism) associates positively with political activities. It also attempts to replicate previous findings showing educational attainment directly predicts political activities. Finally, it asks whether educational attainment moderates the association between racial capital and political activities. Analyses of nationally representative data from the Outlook on Life Surveys, 2012, indicate racial capital associates positively with political activities. Further, educational attainment directly predicts political activities and seemingly attenuates racial capital’s positive association with political activities. However, racial capital associates positively with increased political activities among Black people with an associate degree or more.

What does capital consume? Racial capitalism and the social reproduction of surplus people

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.

The Brown Adventure Romance: Chander Pahar and the Management of Racial Capital

Abstract: Can the archetypal imperial adventurer—the hero of empire's interlinked fictions of discovery and conquest—be brown? This question finds expression in a genre of Bengali literature yet to receive significant scholarly attention. Rather than viewing these novels as a case of Bengal "writing back" to the British genre of the imperial romance, I read them as enquiries into the turbulent shifts of race, migration, and fractured self-fashioning in the age of decolonization. Through a closer look at Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Chander Pahar or The Mountain of the Moon (1937), the essay demonstrates how traces of indentureship and coolie labor as abject and elided forms of brown/ness fracture both the category of the brown expeditioner and its effect on the stereotypes of the dark continent.

Pitch Black: How design entrepreneurs are rethinking race in post‐Katrina schools

AbstractPutting anthropologists of design in conversation with Black studies, this article demonstrates how a group of repentant education entrepreneurs in post‐Katrina New Orleans mobilized racialized affective and narrative surplus within an information economy based on design rituals and protocols. I examine how this splinter group of education reformers established design communities through ritualized “pitches” and show how the egalitarian aspirations of designers rely on forms of empathetic erasure rooted in narratives of spectacular violence and universalist assumptions about the motivations, behaviors, and capacities of so‐called users and so‐called designers. While it is easy to laud the “empathy principles” of design thinking for taking seriously the agency and intellectual capacity of its racialized “users,” this article shares anti‐Blackness theorists’ skepticism of liberal humanization projects and is concerned with the burdens that the relationship between designers and users entails. What is the human at the center of design? Humanity here is not a shared essence, nor an egalitarian relation, but in this instance marks a process through which surplus affect and the spectacle of Blackness is instrumentalized and transmuted into racial capital.

Trading on Diverse Relationships: The Process of Racialized Social Commodification in Multiracial Congregations

Diverse organizations focus on appearing progressive but, in practice, may reproduce internal and external racial inequalities. Previous research has focused on how organizations with superficial levels of diversity may be detrimental to racial equity; are organizations with deep and sustained, cross-racial relationships any better? Drawing on in-depth interviews, field notes, and surveys of 121 head clergy of multiracial churches, we examine the strategies of leaders of multiracial churches to raise funds for their organizations. Our systematic analysis reveals how these, mostly White, religious leaders act as brokers by leveraging embeddedness with congregants of color, social and cultural capital within institutions valuing diversity, and the racial status of their organizations to gain access to social and organizational benefits. We develop a theoretical concept called “racialized social commodification” (RSC) to explore how leaders convert the racial capital of people of color into social and economic resources in contexts of substantive diversity. Through RSC, even organizations boasting strong, cross-racial relationships continue to reproduce racial inequality by protecting power and resource hierarchies that benefit White Americans.

Canadian Higher Education’s Role in Shaping Global Cities as Sites of Racial Imperialist Capitalist Struggle

This article maps out the role of Canadian Higher Education (CHE) in producing global cities as sites of struggle for racial imperialist capital. There are two main parts to the argument. One is that production of global cities has become essential to organizing global racial capital. The other is that within Canada, higher education, consisting of systems of universities and community colleges, is essential to producing global cities for monopoly finance capital (that is, global racial capital in its current form). In developing the analysis, the author pays particular attention to Toronto for several reasons: The author lives in Toronto; is faculty member of the University of Toronto where they have taught and studied postsecondary systems; has been active in Toronto grassroots struggles challenging militarized policing, particularly through participating in the No Pride in Policing Coalition working group; and, finally, Toronto is a designated “Global City” and is a key Canadian site of urban “innovation” for imperialist capital. That is, Toronto belongs to a network of “global cities,” each of which contains infrastructure necessary to coordinate the flow of global racial capital. Global cities are therefore “assets” that must be securitized, as evidenced by the intensification of militarized policing and surveillance. The article explains how Canadian higher education, through its systems of universities and colleges, has been shaped to produce “imperialized cities” for global racial capitalism. The author then outlines the abolition work that has been a source of inspiration for “Another University Now!”

Racial Capital, Public Debt, and the Appropriation of Epekwitk, 1853–1873

This article argues that public debt financing facilitated the appropriation of the territories of Indigenous nations in the British settler colonies and does so through a detailed examination of Prince Edward Island’s public debt. The island’s government used public debt financing as a technique to direct capital into the colony, but to receive loans, the colonial government first needed credit. Settler-colonial credit derived from colonial governments’ claiming the territories of Indigenous nations as government assets. This history highlights the deeply racial characteristics embedded in the expansion of global public debt financing that characterized finance capitalism beginning in the 1820s. In this way, the unique history of the island and its “land question” can be placed into the broader global context of debt markets and processes of racial capital. Specifically, the 1853 Land Purchase Act used public borrowing to purchase lands from British landowners so that the island’s government could hold the land title. British landowners had their ownership rights secured despite the eighteenth-century Peace and Friendship Treaties that guaranteed the Mi’kmaq nation rights to their territory, which included Epekwitk, what the British named Prince Edward Island.

Beyond Rape Culture? Toward A Theory of the Work of Rape

Beyond Rape Culture? Toward A Theory of the Work of Rape

The Making of Modern US Citizenship and Alienage: The History of Asian Immigration, Racial Capital, and US Law

AbstractThis article unravels an important historical conjuncture in the making of modern US citizenship and alienage by drawing on the state's regulation of naturalization as it relates to Asian immigration in the early twentieth century. My primary concern is to examine the socio-legal formations that constructed the thick distinctions between the modern US citizen and alien along the lines of racial difference and racial capital. Specifically, this article argues that Asian immigration to the United States remade the modern US citizen and alien in two significant and interconnected ways. First, it underscores how the adjudication of race in US courts and connected political campaigns re-mapped race in the United States and sharpened the racialization of Asia and Europe in profound ways that ultimately produced immigrants from southern, central, and eastern parts of Asia as the modern US alien. Second, the debate over Asian immigrants’ eligibility to naturalize refashioned legal status as a normative avenue to sustain a regime of racial capital. It cast citizenship as a legal avenue for White men and families to acquire and protect a proprietary interest in citizenship and recast some Asian immigrants as permanent aliens in a period when alienage came to signify disposable immigrant labor. The article concludes by distinguishing how the struggle for US citizenship by Asian immigrants frames the epistemological parameters and political vocabulary of immigration and naturalization reform.

Chemical Disability and Technoscientific Experimental Subjecthood: Reimagining the Canary in the Coal Mine Metaphor

The “canary in the coal mine” metaphor is used by the chemically sensitive community to make sense of and crip spaces containing low-levels of toxic atmospheric petrochemicals. This article reflects on the technocultural genealogies entrenched within the metaphor. A by-product of the imperial exotic bird trade, canary companion species played a formative role in early technoscientific understandings of toxic exposure starting in the nineteenth century as animal sentinels in coal mine rescues. Chemically sensitive people mobilize the canary metaphor to situate themselves within toxic environments as sentinel and experimental subjects, potentiating a feminist knowledge about chemical disability. Identifying as a human canary underscores how consumer commodities are universally structured for the chemical capacities of able-bodied male subjects, revealing gendered and ableist technocultural logics. The metaphor may also conjure a universal form of sacrificial life that ignores how canaries and self-identifying chemically sensitive people are differently situated in the colonial surround of racial capital. Canary knowledges arise from practicing metaphor as meaning and method—they offer a trajectory for crip-led community practices to build more capacious knowledges of exposure by extending anti-colonial and anti-racist commitments towards relational productions of accessibility. Reclaiming technoscientific experimental subjecthood can thus encourage new collective possibilities to address the global onslaught of chemical violence.

Divas on the Dance Floor

Divas on the Dance Floor

Mapping Racial Capital: Gentrification, Race and Value in Three Chicago Neighborhoods

We interrogate the interrelations of race and gentrification in three Chicago neighborhoods of historical significance to Black, Mexican, and Puerto Rican residents. Our previous work indicates that historical legacies of structural racism mean that gentrification works differently in each area, although the extant literature has not directly addressed how race fuels local valuation regimes. For each neighborhood we provide GIS mapping of 30 years of property parcel data and Census block data on race, compared with a parcel level visual scan of material conditions in the built environment. Changes in value at the block level reveal value assigned to whiteness irrespective of material improvement and run counter to standard explanations of gentrification but closely align with a model of racial capitalism. We bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative research by mapping the everyday life of racial change that is felt and known by residents of color in Chicago.

The Durée of Emancipation and the Crisis of Freedom in Antebellum Black Writing

Although the linear trajectories from enslavement to freedom of slave narratives and antislavery novels have been generally accepted, moments of pause and recursiveness at the very instantiation of the narrators’ or protagonists’ emancipation suggest a different, nonlinear temporality. This essay triangulates the various emancipations of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frado in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, and Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave to reveal how the nonlinearity of their manumission circumscribes the freedom concept in such a way that renders it a crisis. Nineteenth-century French thinker Henri Bergson’s philosophy of durée is taken up as a theoretical and analytical point of departure. Durée, when refracted through postcolonial and Black studies interlocutors, offers a richly multivalent way to conceptualize the contemporaneousness of slavery’s past alongside and within the present and its myriad futures, while also conceiving the multi-directionality of these tenses (e.g., the present can also create a past) and acknowledging the agentive creativity of Black fugitive pursuits. In the end, the essay demonstrates how the latent, arrested, cyclical, and backward temporalities of emancipation are not abstractions but lived materialities engendered by the conditions and contexts of unremitting anti-Blackness and racial capital.

Racial Capital, Abolition, and a Geographic Argument for Reparations

AbstractTracing the development of Lehman Brothers from their roots as a dry goods store in Montgomery, Alabama, into a Fortune 500 global financial services company that collapsed in the 2007 financial crisis reveals the contours of US‐style racial capitalism. We highlight how race and capital are geographically rooted in the United States. At the heart of our argument is an understanding of the geographic imperative of capital which creates and exploits differences to wrench capital’s profits from the blood, sweat, and toil of racialised bodies. Perhaps most geographically significant, we advance a second, interrelated argument, the geographic case for reparations. By arguing the system itself is entirely and wholly wrapped in race in ways that extend and advance practices of exploitation, we understand reparations that do not fundamentally undermine, transform, destabilise or smash the system as doomed to be short‐term solutions to long‐term structural problems.

Racial Capital from Pan-Africanism and Coloniality to Epistemic Rupture

The history and nature of racial capitalism remain primary questions of our times. Its true significance and gravity threaten to reveal everything about our contemporary world, from our immediate social arrangements to the global system. Within this, corporate power and the hegemonic culture shape the world at the limits of our perceptions. We must simultaneously engage the contemporary politics of knowledge production around these issues, both within the academy and in popular culture.

Leaving Europe, Aspiring Access: Racial Capital and Its Spatial Discontents among the Euro-Maghrebi Minority

This article explores the emigration of tertiary-educated EU citizens with North African heritage to Dubai. Longitudinal ethnographic data suggests that leaving Europe was a mobility strategy for dealing with a sense of ‘racial stuckedness’ at home, a status concern undergirding their stagnant socio-economic position. By ‘transnationalizing’ Bourdieu’s seminal conceptual tool kit of the ‘forms of capital’, it contrasts the conversion yields of timely achieved educational credentials, marked by racial friction at home but significantly higher returns after transgressing into more favorable status zones overseas. This differently structured outcome suggests the analytical productivity of an altogether distinct value form, ‘racial capital.’

Heimat as Communist Utopia or Leerstelle: Yoko Tawada’s Naked Eye

Kleist Prize recipient Yoko Tawada’s work is often interpreted in terms of cultural and linguistic difference. This article offers a different, materialist reading of her 2004 novel Das nackte Auge (The Naked Eye). Tawada’s text here emerges as a critique of racial capital in the postsocialist condition. Structured textual gaps or Leerstellen—not as text-reader interaction but as “omission of the field to come” (Ernst Bloch)—delineate in literary form an alternative idea of communism: a utopian definition of Heimat (homeland) contesting precarious actualities. The novel’s least verisimilar episode indicates that even in Das nackte Auge’s most avant-garde moments, Tawada implies a peripheral-utopian realism that aspires to map and at once look beyond global capital. Offering new perspectives on Tawada’s work, the article’s further aim is to make the case for thinking difference differently. Following the introduction, the first section establishes the novel’s implicit critique of racial capital by reading three textual vignettes through materialist antiracisms. The second section connects this critique with peripheral realism as a framework for contemporary Marxian aesthetics. The close analysis in the third section fuses historical materialism with attention to the text’s materiality to develop the formal argument concerning structured textual gaps. Juxtaposing Das nackte Auge’s “Western” (capitalist) and “Eastern” (socialist) imaginaries, the final two sections think through the Left’s double impasse in the postindustrial, postsocialist present to address the broader stakes—envisioning a concrete utopian horizon for radical Left politics and aesthetics.

States of Security, Democracy’s Sanctuary, and Captive Maternals in Brazil and the United States

How might we understand the current political formations that emerged from the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the parliamentary coup in Brazil? Despite the U.S. disavowal for human rights violations in foreign policies, the victory of explicitly anti-black, anti-female, anti-gay, anti-poor forces in both democracies seems to be part of the vociferous restructuring of global racial capitalism, apartheid enforced by law and police violence. The more conventional analysis is that the Brazilian coup and Trump's election represent a threat to electoral democracy. Within this perspective, the protests generated by the outcomes of electoral politics in the United States and Brazil aimed to counter the reproduction of white supremacy and racial capital. We propose an alternative reading: the political conflicts that emerged in the aftermath of both events illustrate democracy's strength and its fulfilling promise to maintain racial domination and the political grammar that authorizes its reproduction. If we consider the continuum of racial violence—from slavery to democracy—that permeated the human rights–oriented Obama and Rousseff administrations, why would we unquestionably accept that liberal democracy is the pathway to racial integration and to control anti-black violence and police terror in Brazil and the United States?

Celebrity Capital of Actresses of Color: A Mixed Methods Study

Is colorism in Hollywood a problem? A pilot study was conducted on two actresses, dark-skinned actress Lupita Nyong’o who won Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2014 for her portrayal of a slave Patsey in the 2013 movie “12 Years a Slave,” 2013, and light-skinned actress Halle Berry who won Best Actress Oscar in 2002 for her portrayal of a widow Leticia Musgrove in the 2001 movie “Monster’s Ball.” Data obtained from the mixed-methods design employed in the study found a significant difference in how often an actress’ complexion was used in a news story and how they were described using the language of racial capital. Contrary to expectations set by understanding of the concept of colorism, darker-skinned Nyong’o’s racial capital was stated in the news less prominently than the racial capital of lighter-skinned Berry. Actresses’ celebrity capital and ways of conversion of capital is visualized in Venn diagrams.

Yoga and the Metaphysics of Racial Capital

The professionalization of yoga teacher-training at Kripalu Center, a yoga facility named after Swami Kripalu, not only displaces the forms of spiritual quest from which the Center emerged. It also makes its yoga culture vulnerable to the circulation and consumption of racial fetishes, or racially inscribed images that distract from, or magically veil altogether, the endemic complications and histories of racial capitalism. Kripalu Center installs professionalization procedures – including the standardization of curriculum and assessment to legitimate teachers for competition in an expanding yoga market – that make it complicit with the transmission of racial fetishes. Ultimately, professionalization becomes one vector of a larger complex I call the metaphysic of racial capital, or an underlying narrative of capitalist production plotted by various forms of racial fetishes that ensure capital’s continuous regeneration.