Racial Capitalism Research Articles

Keeping out by keeping alive: Refugee rentierism, racialized containment and the humanitarian-development nexus in transit states

This article explores humanitarian-development responses to displacement as postcolonial modes of security within actually existing racial capitalism. Focusing on Greece's “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” program, it provides insight into “make-live” interventions that temporarily subsidize stranded migrants’ social reproduction at Europe's frontiers. The article argues that development-led refugee-hosting strategies, marketed as win–win solutions for both “hosted” and “hosting” communities, actually serve a twofold function: containing racially subordinate outsiders and compensating so-called transit countries for taking up the task of “keeping out by keeping alive.” By minimally supporting migrants’ social reproductive needs within designated territories, the racial biopolitics of the humanitarian-development nexus brings surplus populations into the fold of local capital accumulation while sustaining the global color line. Analyzing the refugee humanitarian-development nexus as a spatioracial fix that harnesses the vital capacities of surplus populations, the article seeks to: invite discussion on the social reproduction of populations violently cast out of the wage relation; theorize racial capitalism beyond metropolitan centers and their (post)colonial borderlands, highlighting the role of intermediary spaces as crucial nodes of georacial and capitalist stabilization; and demonstrate how the dialectic between humanitarianism and rentier economies embeds new racialized hierarchies between crisis-affected local “hosts” and surplused migrant “guests.”

From White Supremacy to a Multiracial Mainstream in Hawai‘i

Abstract Contemporary racial theorization about American society assumes the universality of White dominance as its point of departure. We argue here that Hawai‘i is an exception, where White supremacy has given way to a multiracial mainstream, shared by the Chinese, Japanese, and Whites. This was a surprising development in a state founded in settler colonialism and racial capitalism, which was moreover a racially hierarchical plantation society until the middle of the twentieth century. The pivot, in Hawai‘i as on the mainland, occurred during the post-World War II period, when the economy underwent a transformation requiring a more educated workforce. On the mainland, this socioeconomic shift opened up the mainstream to the so-called White ethnics. But these were few in number in Hawai‘i, and so the Chinese and Japanese ascended socioeconomically and socially instead. The ethnoracial hierarchy created in this period is still in evidence, as shown by pronounced inequalities among Hawaiian groups. However, the end of White supremacy has been associated with very widespread ethnoracial mixing in families. We discuss some ways in which Hawai‘i may offer a preview of twenty-first-century changes in the U.S. as a whole.

Building New Clubhouses: Bridging Refugee and Migrant Women into Technology Design and Production by Leveraging Assets

While HCI scholars have examined how e-textiles serve to bridge the gender divide, there is little research into refugee, asylum seeker and low socioeconomic migrant women (WRAMs) and e-textiles. This paper presents the results of a series of two community-led participatory design workshops to study the factors that enable these women, who face intersecting barriers, to engage in STEM oriented making activities. Our findings examine 1) deficit discourse and strengths-based narratives; 2) bridging STEM skills into a culturally safe and tailored learning environment; 3) bridging commitment through commercial viability; and 4) the benefits of organizational partnering to bridge skills and diverse communities. This paper makes three contributions. First, we offer a strengths-based counter narrative on the abilities, assets and motivations of WRAMs to engage in makerspaces, particularly STEM skills. Second, we offer a discussion on the implications of racial capitalism and internalized bias which limits resources, research and practice with WRAMs and consequently, technological design and production. Third, we extend the work of Buechley and contribute five strategies to bridge WRAMs into STEM oriented makerspace activities to build a ''new clubhouse''. We discuss the vital role researchers, technologists, makerspaces and financiers must play in supporting these new clubhouses to facilitate strengths-based narratives, harnessing and amplifying skills-based assets, in order to diversify who shapes technology and thus what is shaped.

How and Why Does Redlining Matter for Present-Day Health? Critical Perspectives on Causality, Cartography, and Capitalism.

Recent years have seen an explosion of public health research on associations between historical redlining maps created by a US government agency, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), and present-day outcomes. Yet precisely how and why HOLC's surveys help us understand the underpinnings of present-day racial inequities remains unclear. We apply an interdisciplinary perspective to assess the contributions and limitations of this literature, particularly with regard to causal mechanisms and theoretical explanations. While research often frames HOLC redlining as a measure of structural racism that directly shapes present-day outcomes, we look instead to racial capitalism to understand how and why racialized housing policies are implemented. We argue that the HOLC maps represent symptoms, not causes, of systematic disinvestment in Black communities, that redlining was not produced by the federal government in isolation but was shaped by public‒private collaboration and infused with capitalist logics, and that redlining interacted with many other forms of racialized housing dispossession to shape present-day riskscapes. We conclude by offering conceptual and methodological recommendations for public health researchers, including suggestions for data sources other than HOLC maps. (Am J Public Health. 2025;115(5):769-779. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2024.308000).

The Political Economy of Racial Capitalism in the United States

This article summarizes recent scholarship on racial capitalism with an eye toward highlighting the opportunities the lens poses for the field of American political economy. It reviews the origins and evolution of the construct as well as its contemporary developments and critiques. It highlights three areas of generative dialogue between scholarship working at the intersection of racial capitalism and American political economy: first, surrounding the value of studying the political economy through a relational lens; second, involving how mid-range theoretical tools can generate more insights into specific institutional constraints and questions of agency, contingency, and change; and third, how deeper engagement between the two can productively reorient assessments of inequality in American democracy.

Decolonial Framings in Global Health Law: Redressing Colonial Legacies for a Just and Equitable Future.

Colonialism has produced the global health system, and decoloniality must inform global health law. This article considers the foundational impact of colonialism on the global health system and advocates for adopting decoloniality as a crucial framework to reshape global health law. Through a historical lens, it examines how European colonialism established power dynamics and structures that continue to influence contemporary global health governance. This article calls for overcoming enduring challenges by emphasizing the urgency of dismantling outdated and unjust systems that perpetuate health inequities and hinder effective interventions. It argues for a paradigm shift toward epistemically inclusive, ethical, and equitable practices, emphasizing the active participation of marginalized communities in health policymaking. By addressing the root causes of health disparities and decoupling health systems from racial capitalism, a decolonial approach promises a more just and effective future for global health law.

Pot for Profit: Cannabis Legalization, Racial Capitalism, and the Expansion of the Carceral State by Joseph Mello

Pot for Profit: Cannabis Legalization, Racial Capitalism, and the Expansion of the Carceral State <i>by Joseph Mello</i>

Unpacking the crackdown on Palestine solidarity activism in the UK in a post-7 October reality

Since the events of 7 October 2023, and the subsequent Israeli military campaign that has decimated the civilian population in the Gaza Strip, the increase in grassroots solidarity for Palestine has been significant. The response from ‘Western’ governments has ranged from efforts to contain, to outright attempts to criminalise and delegitimise solidarity with and for Palestine. Here we unpack how Palestine solidarity work has been subjected to increased scrutiny, monitoring, and crackdown in the UK. We highlight that suppression of public support for Palestine takes on a variety of forms, including attempts to foster a narrative that delegitimises the cause of Palestine and those who support it, to repression and criminalisation of those involved, to the more informal silencing tactics, suppression of workplace displays of solidarity, university crackdowns on free speech and attacks on arts and cultural spaces. We note the racialised nature of the criminalisation of dissent, highlighting the disproportionate targeting of people of colour and members of the Muslim community, and reach the conclusion that suppression of pro-Palestine solidarity is linked to a broader attempt to maintain a status quo in the UK (and beyond), one that is based on the functioning and maintenance of global racial capitalism.

Contesting Racial Capitalism in the Postcolonial City: A Response Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City. By LevensonZachary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 296pp. £23.99 (paper). ISBN: 9780197629253

Contesting Racial Capitalism in the Postcolonial City: A Response Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City. By LevensonZachary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 296pp. £23.99 (paper). ISBN: 9780197629253

Radical Resistance in the Penumbra of the Law: Legal Mobilization for Migrant Farmworkers under Neo-colonial Racial Capitalism

Radical Resistance in the Penumbra of the Law: Legal Mobilization for Migrant Farmworkers under Neo-colonial Racial Capitalism

Creating cities of care: Towards a new radical care framework for geographical research with urban migrants and refugees

This paper brings into proximity and advances geographical engagements with care to propose a new radical care framework for research with minoritised migrants and refugees in the city. Informed by calls for alternative and care- full modes of knowledge production through creative engagements with lived experiences of care and building on recent scholarship on shadow infrastructures of care in cities, it examines how we might attend to the invisibilised modes of caring in the city with migrants and refugees. The paper outlines three dimensions of the framework – knowledges, temporalities and spatialities – as starting points to develop more expansive understandings of care and its radical potential, offering new politics and poetics that challenge and refuse the co-optation of care into the logics of neoliberalism and racial capitalism and to imagine more care- full urban futures.

Is Walk Score white score? Deconstructing a walkability algorithm in the context of racial capitalism

ABSTRACT Walkability functions as an assumed good in many urbanist circles, and numerous metrics claim to quantify it. We examine one widely used metric, Walk Score, to consider how it extends racialized property formations. In particular, we consider how it relates to concentrations of whiteness, differential investment flows, and property valuations that are already inherently raced. The article illustrates how place (de)valorization co-occurs with racial segregation through a brief examination of Walk Score in Chicago. We situate our critique within literature that challenges the neutrality of walkability metrics and contextualize this neutrality within racial capitalism, arguing that this metric reflects and could contribute to inequitable investment flows and property (de)valuation. By examining these relationships, we argue that Walk Score takes part in reifying the geographies of racial capitalism and caution against algorithms that implicitly or explicitly value certain places above others.

Imperial durabilities of debt: indigeneity, racial capitalism and the ‘tribal’ figure in finance

ABSTRACT With increased acceptance of credit as a ‘solution’ for socio-economic challenges, financial inclusion has risen as a top agenda point for international organizations and state governments alike. This has invited large financial institutions as investors who extend loans to unbanked populations in ever-growing numbers. Political economy scholarship explains this in ‘economic’ terms of profit accumulation or in Marxist conceptions of capitalist overaccumulation and financial spillover to new markets. Departing from solely economic explanations, this paper examines financial inclusion among tribal populations in West Bengal, India, revealing continuities of colonial policies that privatize public goods and perpetuate racialized hierarchies. Privatization contributes to making credit an essential feature of sustaining everyday life. Through historically-attentive ethnographic methods with financial inclusion institutions in West Bengal, this paper highlights the centrality of indigeneity, the ‘tribal’ and racial capitalism undergirding contemporary financial inclusion. The enduring legacies of colonial finance showcase the racialised politics of financial inclusion and credit markets for underbanked communities.

Critical retelling of dental ethics told through ‘George Washington’s Complete Denture’

Dental ethics is a specialised branch of dentistry addressing ethical issues in dental practice. However, dental ethics and diversity are thought to be at odds within the practice of dentistry....

The cultural gentrification of the sneaker: sporting apparel, social media, and digital consumerism in racial capitalism

ABSTRACT Based on interviews with 15 sneaker customizers immersed in sneaker culture, we outline how participants perceived the digitization of sneaker culture - particularly social media - as spurring a gradual-but-tangible displacement of sneaker culture's original constituents (predominantly urban Black), by a new constituency (predominantly White middle/upper-class) who use sneakers instrumentally to pursue profit, fame, or digital influence. For participants, the sneaker industry's shift to digitally-focused model of production has rationalized the consumption process in ways that produce “hypebeasts” and maximize corporate profit, yet exclude poorer - but “purer” - sneaker consumers. As such, we argue that trajectory of sneaker customization demonstrates the digital architectures that accelerate cultural gentrification in (late) racial capitalism, whereby the creative cultural aesthetics, practices, and symbolic value of marginalized racial groups become professionalized, corporatized, extracted, and expropriated by mainstream commercial forces, resulting in marginalized cultural spaces being increasingly dominate

Fieldwork in transition: Rethinking anxieties, solidarities, and ontologies amid compounding forms of distress

AbstractDrawing on preliminary research in Italy in the months following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gradual lifting of pandemic‐related public health measures, this essay explores the widespread economic, political, and environmental anxieties as well as calls for solidarity that were circulating at this time and their implications for ethnographers in attempting to “make sense” of sociocultural phenomena in a world that feels “unhinged.” From these swirling anxieties, hegemonic framings of “reality” by state actors contrast significantly with the lived experiences of the working class and reveal the function of salvage realism in reproducing racial capitalism. Following recent work in anthropology on the unhinged and affective possibilities in troubled times, I argue that these dynamics demand deeper anthropological engagement with theories that continue to be marginalized by the discipline, including from Black and Indigenous scholarship. These dynamics also raise important questions regarding the realities and temporalities of fieldwork and the onto‐epistemological frames that inform anthropological research processes.

Accidentally telling the truth: racial capitalism on the college sports plantation

ABSTRACT On 27 February 2021, Creighton University men’s basketball coach Greg McDermott asked his team “to stay on the plantation.” This essay argues that by quarantining the “the plantation’s” enunciation within an interpersonal, affective space and seizing the opportunity to recuperate intercollegiate athletics through the symbolic terrain of “diversity,” McDermott’s apology and Creighton’s response foreclosed the critical viewpoint that the plantation might otherwise represent. Together, they functioned to remind us that racial justice is a matter of communicative behavior and need not disrupt the flow of wealth in college sports from Black athletes to predominantly white institutions and their stakeholders.

Specters of the Plantationocene: Race, (Auto)mobility, and (Un)freedom in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime And Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus

ABSTRACT The United States is the biggest cumulative contributor to greenhouse gases to date. While Climate Change is a globally shared issue, its roots can be traced to the United States and its material and cultural dependence on automobility – a petroleum-based infrastructure that supports an auto-centric built landscape. But nothing is natural about this relationship between US automobility and Climate Change. In this article, I emphasize the narrative underpinnings of US automobility as an under-examined origin of Climate Change. In particular, I examine post-1945 literary narratives that explore US automobility and the American exceptionalist narrative of liberal individual freedom that legitimized it. If American exceptionalist narratives of freedom facilitated US automobility (and its corollary, Climate Change), I demonstrate the ‘wild possibility’ of literary narrative forms to challenge the liberal progressive time of US automobility and offer us alternative relations with time, history, and freedom. By examining the deep history between racial capitalism and US automobility in Ragtime and Get On the Bus, I demonstrate how the history of Climate Change and US automobility are founded on similar roots: racial capitalism. These stories offer alternative understandings of time and history beyond progress and liberal individualism through what I call ‘spectral literary ecologies’ – haunting relations that challenge linear time through nonlinear intimacies across time and space – thereby granting us hope in alternative ways of being in this American Anthropocene.

White profitability: an intersectional critique of Chinese women’s reckoning with the English language industry

ABSTRACT English language teaching (ELT) is a racially stratified industry that privileges whiteness as a norm. Drawing upon a Women of Colour feminist research design that draws on both racial capitalism and intersectional perspectives, this paper examines the experiences of 18 Chinese women teachers in the ELT industry through an innovative interviewing approach called Tucao. Our study reveals how the ELT industry in China constructs whiteness as a profitable investment for Chinese people – and, in so doing, constructs Chinese women as subordinate, exploitable, and ineffective teachers. These teachers, however, quietly oppose this gendered racism in the workplace. While this study focuses on the Chinese context, the study introduces the concept of ‘White profitability’ to explain how the commodification of whiteness underpins intersectional racism experienced by teachers of colour in the global ELT industry. The study contributes methodologically, empirically and theoretically to the scholarship on racial capitalism, intersectionality, and the commodification of race and gender in educational contexts.

Developing Annihilationist Strategies: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and The Racial Capitalist University

In this article, I situate the story of my students in the university as a racial and gendered capitalist institution which requires and deploys diversity initiatives as part of its strategy to maintain its accumulative potential. Using several examples from my experiences with students on Georgetown’s campus, I show how such strategies produce an excess emotional stress for students of color, and women of color in particular, who are forced to participate in this form of labor on campus. I will then turn to the kinds of strategies – strategies which I term annihilationist – that we might deploy in our classrooms in order to begin to teach students the skills they need to protect themselves as they seek to overturn systems that produce so much of their unwellness. I evoke “annihilation” to center anti-caste and anti-colonial traditions that challenge the university’s rigid hierarchies and stratifications.