Racial Capitalism Research Articles

Pot for Profit: Cannabis Legalization, Racial Capitalism, and the Expansion of the Carceral State. By Joseph Mello. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. 208p. $105.00 cloth, $26.00 paper.

Pot for Profit: Cannabis Legalization, Racial Capitalism, and the Expansion of the Carceral State. By Joseph Mello. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. 208p. $105.00 cloth, $26.00 paper.

Racial Capitalism and Subaltern Struggles in Neo-Apartheid Sweden

Racial Capitalism and Subaltern Struggles in Neo-Apartheid Sweden

Racial Capitalism in an Ethnic Minority Border Region

Abstract In the social, historical, and political context of Xi Jinping’s China, particular forms of racialization and racial capitalism have emerged in Altay Prefecture, the homeland of ethnic Kazakhs on China’s northwest border. This study examines the husbandry industry in Altay Prefecture to elucidate how Xi’s China has built a mode of racial capitalism through the management of Kazakh land, ethnicity, and culture. Within the framework of a case study, I employ document collection and participant observation methods to gather data that are then interpreted through critical policy analysis. The research shows that Kazakhs have been racialized based on their mobile pastoral traditions, enslaved in the “debt economy,” and exploited through husbandry policies and programs. The particular ways in which husbandry has been restructured and assimilated into Chinese industrial production chains exploit and reproduce the Kazakh-Han hierarchy and segregation. This close look at racial capitalism in Altay sheds light on the operations of Xi’s ecological civilization and war on poverty policies in an ethnic minority border region and discusses how they align with the broader geopolitics of the Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

“They talk about it like it's an overdose crisis when in fact it's basically genocide”: The experiences of Indigenous peoples who use illicit drugs in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood

Indigenous Peoples who use illicit drugs (IPWUID) are disproportionately represented among toxic drug poisoning deaths in Canada. These drug-related harms are framed by the historical and ongoing trauma related to settler colonialism and are acutely visible in Vancouver, Canada's Downtown Eastside - a low-income neighbourhood that is an epicenter of the drug poisoning crisis and characterized by entrenched poverty, substance use, violence, and homelessness. This study was undertaken to examine the experiences and perspectives of IPWUID in the Downtown Eastside regarding the drug poisoning crisis and the responsiveness of harm reduction programs within the context of settler colonialism. Indigenous-led qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 IPWUID recruited by Indigenous peer researchers. Indigenous ways of knowing were embedded throughout the entire research design to ensure research was culturally congruent. Interview transcripts were analyzed thematically and interpreted by drawing on concepts of social violence and racial capitalism. Our analysis reviewed three key themes that centered the experiences of IPWUID in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in relation to the drug poisoning crisis: (1) that the drug poisoning crisis is understood as a form of genocide toward Indigenous Peoples; (2) that the crisis is experienced within the context of pervasive distrust and adversarial relationships with police rooted in structurally racist experiences of place-based policing practices; and (3) that there is a desire for culturally-safe harm reduction care with Indigenous representation, cultural integration, and that addresses inequities and injustice stemming from colonialism and structural racism. Findings demonstrate how responses to the drug poisoning crisis among IPWUID need to respond to social and materials conditions perpetuated by colonialism and racial capitalism, while also centering IPWUID through the development and implementation of Indigenous-led and culturally safe harm reduction approaches.

Challenging SpaceX on the US–Mexico border: Value struggles against racial authoritarian neoliberalism

SpaceX’s launch site on the US–Mexico border, in the Rio Grande Valley, is an ideal example of the interconnected relationship between racial capitalism and authoritarian neoliberalism, the neoliberal expropriation of spaces and communities, and the tapestries of resistance weaved against these processes. The privatisation of space exploration is an illustration of the development of authoritarian modes of governance that are designed to facilitate such expropriation of spaces and communities. In the case considered in this article, these processes are directly related to the development of racial capitalism on the US–Mexico border. This article places the focus on how racial authoritarian neoliberalism is a response to capitalism’s inability to successfully impose a hegemonic project.

Stronger together: race, power, and parent-teacher partnership in the COVID-19 era

ABSTRACT This article explores parent-teacher partnerships as a strategy for improving students’ educational experiences and addressing racial equity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a subset of qualitative open-response questions specific to family perceptions from a large-scale 2020 Boston Public Schools survey, the results of this study indicate that the demands of remote learning during the pandemic left families, particularly those of Black and Latinx backgrounds, desiring stronger relational connections with teachers and schools. This analysis furthers the literature on race and education by attending to how white racial domination influences educational opportunity, even in times of crisis. Accordingly, our findings emphasize how the wider society must reckon with the effects of racial capitalism as a driving force of racialized inequities in student and family experiences in education.

Entangled Genealogies

This article traces the history of white mulberry (Morus alba) alongside the histories of Charlottesville, Virginia and the author’s genealogy as a mixed-European and Asian-descended American, to explore the situated and connected histories between plants, land and humans. This approach allows the re-mixing of various kinds of knowledge (designerly, personal, archival, scholarly) available to the author, and explores the ways in which attention to place, plant and people can reveal the entanglements between living actors and mega-systems of racial capitalism, and point toward further avenues for inquiry for those seeking to build worlds beyond capitalism

Abolition methodologies

Pervasive carceral conditions are being met with a range of efforts to make what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “freedom as a place.” What does it mean to create such places? We answer here by taking seriously the methodological demands of how we do abolition work in the academy. Abolition methodologies entail a responsibility to bridge the spaces between academic and community work focused on resisting and building alternatives to carcerality. Taking our lead from organizers embedded in communities of practice and care, we see abolition methodologies as an opportunity to pursue a range of artistic, educational, and politically strategic scholar and scholar-activist works. Inspired by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s understanding that refusals can offer imaginative alternatives, we present four principles of abolitionist methodologies grounded in generative acts of refusal. These include abolition as reorientation, as contextual, as livingness, and as relational. To illustrate these principles in action, we discuss our efforts in the Prison Agriculture Lab to develop creative works and beneficial tools that, we hope, will help upend racial capitalism and advance the practice of abolition in daily life.

In the interstices of ubiquity: respatialising Bogotá through black relational territories

ABSTRACT Through a narrativization that connects heterogeneous and often undetected social lives in Bogotá, Colombia, this article charts the rhizomatic spatial crossings of continuously mobile urban trajectories, the often-unsettled forms of dwelling that they inhabit, and their capacity to make place despite the dismantling of community cohesion and the necropolitical forms of urbanity operated by racial capitalism and coloniality across Latin America – what the article refers to as relational territories, drawing on a rich scholarship on Black Geographies of the everyday and Latin American ‘territorios’. From there, the article explores how paths are being charted out of the racial-colonial maze of Latin America’s city-making, through multiple forms of ordinary resistance/re-existence that create life in the interstices of ongoing necro-politics . Ultimately, the article shows how this pluralistic repertoire mobilized from the urban margins not only points to the difficulties of emplacement for Afro-descendant dwellers in Latin American cities but also to the possibility of respatialising the urban from the decolonial relationality of Améfrica.

The Maya Train: Infrastructure and Racial Capitalism in Southeast Mexico

AbstractIn this paper, I illustrate the interplay between infrastructure and racialised differentiation through the case of the Maya Train—a contentious megaproject aimed at constructing 1,554 km of rail tracks across southeast Mexico, led by the López Obrador federal administration. Drawing on an analysis of narratives produced by the state, I argue that the Maya Train sustains and reproduces racial capitalism. The argument is developed by putting Gargi Bhattacharyya's and Nancy Fraser's understanding of the racial capitalism framework in conversation with Mónica Moreno Figueroa's conceptualisation of mestizaje. I show how the Maya Train functions as a project of mestizaje by promising homage, social justice, and development while also acting as a homogenising and oppressive force. The racialising practices embedded in the megaproject reproduce and extend colonial legacies in a heartland of expropriation and are transformed into materiality through the power of the state.

Racial Capitalism, Cedric Robinson, and a Method for Architectural History

Elaborating on the techniques that the Black Studies scholar Cedric Robinson uses to write the histories of racial capitalism, this essay outlines a way to approach longue durée architectural histories. Robinson analyses racial capitalism in Black Marxism (1983) through the practices of what he calls the Black radical tradition, and these techniques provide a way to conceptualise a history of architecture in the modern Atlantic World that focuses on denaturalising the racial regimes that have shaped it. Using a series of examples—a lecture by a carpenter-architect in upstate New York, Thomas Jefferson’s house Monticello, an advertisement for marble-quarrying labour in Tennessee, and the commodity chains of lumber—this essay outlines the questions and methods that Robinson’s approach, which he describes both as a “counterfeiting” of received discourse and as a non-dialectical negation of that discourse, suggests for architectural histories that attends to vast geographies and timescales.

Ambiguity, consciousness, and plantation afterlives in Brazil’s racial capitalism

ABSTRACT This paper studies racial ambiguity and consciousness to advance debates on labor and discourse in racial capitalism and the plantationocene. I examine how the historical co-constitution of race and class shapes ideology and discourse, and how non-white workers perceive racial discrimination in a context where race and class strongly overlap. Focusing on sugarcane in Northeast Brazil, my methods include interviews with workers and union officials, and ethnographic observations at plantations and sugarcane municipalities. I argue that structural racism and class exploitation were forged through colonial plantation systems and that respondents both uneasily follow and openly challenge ideologies of racial ambiguity.

Geographies of race and ethnicity 3: Black Geographies of creativity

This is the last of three reports on Black Geographies. Through theories then practices of Black creativity, the report highlights the need for critical engagements with creativity, as necessary to Black life but not innocent in racial capitalism.

Cabecitas Blancas: settler colonialism, racial capitalism and the (im)mobility of borders for Yucatecan migrant families

In this paper, I analyse the intersection of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and border violence by examining Cabecitas Blancas a project run by the Yucatecan government to reunite families divided by the US-Mexican border. A unique program in Mexico, Cabecitas Blancas helps elders who have not seen their children living in the United States for at least 10 years, due to their children’s precarious immigration status, reunite for a short period of time. I have developed the term tramitología to show the way the settler colonial state monitors and restrict Indigenous mobility by designating who is “worthy” of government support. I demonstrate how the flow of mostly Maya elders via Cabecitas Blancas between borders is facilitated only because they become state commodities that sustain racial capitalism via tourism and multicultural policies. Ultimately, I argue that reform programs such as Cabecitas Blancas enable and (re)produce exploitation, settler colonialism and border violence. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with government officials as well as YouTube videos and online news articles depicting different stages of the program.

Race, sovereignty, and White settler colonial studies: placing settlers at the Cultural Interface

ABSTRACT White settler colonial studies has been widely criticised for representing settler colonialism as an impenetrable and inevitable structure. This article therefore turns to explore how race preconditions and limits the construction of settler subjects. We draw on Torres Strait Islander theorist Martin Nakata’s Cultural Interface theory to unsettle ‘common-sense’ theories of race, and reconceive of the place where European and Indigenous cultures meet as sovereign Indigenous land. We extend Cultural Interface theory to locate White settler standpoints within the intertwined histories of racial capitalism and European and US imperialism. We argue that these histories orient settlers towards White possessive sovereignty. This article then deploys this framework to provide a deeper understanding of the disciplinary limits of White settler colonial studies through two case studies. First, we analyse Liberia’s construction as a settler colonial nation to denaturalise and historicise White settler standpoints. Second, we analyse the White settler standpoint institutionalised in White settler colonial studies’ descriptions of the settler/Indigenous binary, the logic of elimination, and settler sovereignty. In both cases, White settler standpoints are shaped and limited by the racialised logics of White possessive sovereignty. We nevertheless conclude that settlers may reorient themselves towards Indigenous sovereignty.

Escaping the Zionist Circle: Notes on Racial Capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition

From the 1947–8 Nakba to the 2023–4 Gaza genocide, the history of Palestine appears to be stuck in a vicious circle of violence from which escape seems increasingly elusive. This leads one to ask, can one ever escape the Zionist circle? The work of Cedric Robinson provides a potential path forward. Since his death in 2016, Robinson’s name has become synonymous with the study of racial capitalism. But while racial capitalism was the background of his work, his chief concern was the Black Radical Tradition. Unlike racial capitalism, this concept has remained under-theorised, but without thoroughly accounting for it, our understanding of racial capitalism remains incomplete at best, misguided at worst. In this article, I turn our attention to the Black Radical Tradition and attempt to define it. As Robinson argued, the Black Radical Tradition is not simply derivative of racial capitalism; it actually precedes it and subverts it. Returning to Palestine, I show how Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition can contribute to our understanding of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, and I suggest that at least in some sense, the Palestinians have actually been escaping the Zionist circle all along.

Capital’s Genocide: A Conversation on Racial Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, and Possible Worlds after Gaza

Taking as a starting point the desire of many to locate the unfolding genocide in Gaza in the irrationality of its perpetrators — the Israeli state and/or its imperial backers — this article proposes instead to understand it as an extreme expression of the continuous violence necessary to maintain not only local settler colonial rule, but the global capitalist system as a whole. Building on the existing literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism, and insisting on the ways that both should be understood not as discrete, self-contained objects of study, but as co-constitutive elements of the global order, this article attempts to illuminate the structural logics at play in Israel’s latest and most brutal assault on Palestinian life. In doing so, the article emphasises Zionism’s role in maintaining western imperialism at a crucial nodal point of the world economy and, in turn, the latter’s commitment to guaranteeing its stability and dominance. The article resists, however, the urge to move from explaining current structures of domination to declaring them as final or unshakable. It therefore ends by proposing possible different tomorrows, through an engagement with the Palestinian revolutionary tradition.

Apartheid in the Twenty-first Century: Racial Capitalism and the Struggles in Palestine

Apartheid has become an increasingly important framework for understanding and challenging Israeli rule in Palestine. The Apartheid Convention states apartheid is a crime against humanity. We contend what is missing from this definition of apartheid is an economic and ontological link. Although the current legal definition focuses solely on the political regime, it does not provide a strong basis for critiquing the economic aspects of a settler colonial state embedded in apartheid. To address this concern, we propose a more comprehensive definition of apartheid which grew out of the struggle in South Africa during the 1970s that gained support among revolutionaries due to the limits of decolonisation in South Africa after 1994 — highlighting the reality(ies) that apartheid is intimately connected to capitalism. This conceptualisation was termed racial capitalism. This article argues that racial capitalism provides a more thorough understanding of the destructive dynamics of the Israeli settler colonial project, one that insists that the struggle against Israeli domination must confront both the apartheid state and the racial capitalist system if Palestinians ever hope to achieve liberation.

Palestine and the Dialectic of Racial Capitalism

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.

Racial Capitalism: From British Colonialism to the Settler Colonial Apartheid State

This article explores the development of capitalism in Palestine under British colonialism and the Zionist settler colonial project. It examines first, Israel's internal and external capitalist dynamism, including its treatment of its non-European citizens, namely indigenous Palestinians, and non-Ashkenazi (Arab) Jewish settlers. Second, it explores the state's interdependent relationship with Western, especially US imperialism. The article argues that the British colonial state was crucial in enabling the Zionist project to materialize, leading to weakening the socio-economic fabric of the Palestinians in their own lands and homeland, creating a favourable condition for the Zionist project to gradually penetrate the land of Palestine and dispossess its population. As a European (Jewish) settler colonial movement, Zionism, founded on racism and racialization, aimed at establishing a new Jewish enclave separate and independent from the indigenous Palestinians. This separateness made it resemble apartheid South Africa, yet the historical specificity of Palestine, where the Zionist settlers did not just alienate, exclude and when needed, use and exploit the Palestinians, but also expelled the indigenous Palestinians and claim Palestine as a ‘pure’ Jewish state.