Racial Capitalism Research Articles

Racial capitalism, uneven development, and the abstractive powers of race and money

How does the circulation of capital in the form of money and finance mobilize different constructions of “Blackness” across historical-geographical contexts, and how does this produce uneven development? This contribution offers theoretical and methodological provocations to think about this question, drawing on two cases of raced finance: race-based bank lending in the United States, and international investment to sub-Saharan countries. I argue that the impersonal character of social domination under capitalism, expressed in and by the movement of abstract categories (such as the commodity, value, money, the state) requires that we carefully mobilize the notion of abstraction in theorizing the co-production of racialized difference and uneven development. I develop this conceptual argument by way of a sympathetic yet critical engagement with recent scholarship on racial capitalism, and by bringing the critique of political economy into conversation with the Black radical tradition. The key question is not the extent to which cases of raced finance exhibit a paradigmatic “anti-Blackness.” Rather, it is about how the abstractive powers of race and the social forms of capital refract each other in violent configurations, and contribute to giving the capitalist production of space a raced imprint. The co-production of racialized and spatial difference thus enhances processes of capitalist discipline and extraction mediated by money, while the totalizing operations of money reproduce racialized power relations and uneven development. I then turn to the work of Bhandar and Toscano to reflect methodologically on how to mobilize various levels and modalities of abstraction in concrete research.

Rethinking the effects of gentrification on the health of Black communities in the United States: Towards a racialized health framework

ABSTRACT Current research suggests that gentrification is an important determinant of health. Furthermore, this research concludes that the health impacts of gentrification are heterogeneous and may have adverse impacts on Black Americans. However, existing gentrification and health research has not fully engaged with the racialized processes that produce these uneven impacts. To address this gap, we develop a conceptual framework to describe how gentrification may create unique experiences and differentiated health impacts for Black Americans. Applying a lens of racial capitalism, we examine how an ongoing legacy of structurally racist urban and housing policy in the United States has disinvested from and devalued Black communities; thereby rendering them vulnerable to subsequent reinvestment through gentrification. Next, we consider how this history creates unique health vulnerabilities to gentrification for Black residents. Finally, we describe pathways of displacement—physical and symbolic—through which these unique health vulnerabilities are shaped to produce differences in health.

Review of The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value by Seb Franklin (University of Minnesota Press)

The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value examines the convergence between the recursive function of value in capitalist economies and the functions of abstraction, ascription, and disposal that govern digital systems. Franklin argues that digitality’s most pernicious effects are apparent in how digital systems create the illusion of frictionlessness, connectivity, and access, while at the same time working to reinforce a logic of exclusion that externalizes the material realities of depletion. Participation in value-mediated social relations has become mandatory due to the global reach and ubiquitous extension of the informational and economic systems under which workers labor. Race and gender are social categories which position marginalized workers, especially workers from the Global South, as unreliable components in the system, the digitally disposed. Franklin argues, using the study of communication systems, that this positioning is not a flaw of the system, but is rather the intentional effect of forms of capitalist accumulation that depend on the precarity of the lives of those who generate the labor that the system depends on. A valuable contribution to the study of digitality, neoliberalism, political economy, racial capitalism, and technological history, this work shows that the social effects of digitality are not new, but rather are an intensification of the exclusions and forms of marginalization upon which capitalism depends.

Preface to a Philosophy by Which No One Can Live

This essay proposes an ethics for critical philosophies attuned to global white supremacy and its effects of violence, erasure, and precarity. The essay examines Arthur Schopenhauer as a potential forefigure for critical practices that aim to attend to the precarious survival of the global majority engulfed by white supremacy and racial capitalism. Through Denise Ferreira da Silva’s and Sara Ahmed’s philosophies of race, the essay carries out an autotheoretical dissection—tracing Ruffin’s own myopic relation to the white supremacist moralities that continue to thrive in critical interdisciplinary German studies. As a way out of the aporia that white supremacy enacts, the essay proposes an orientation away from what is thought to be life and toward a critical aesthetics that attends to the unsurviving.

Roofscapes

This article reads several works of African American literature that depict the urban roofscape as a site of contemporary fugitive praxis, made in and against the enclosures of 20th century urban space. The forms of freedom rehearsed on the roof are intersecting, overlapping and, at times, contradictory. Ultimately, I argue that the roofscape offers an analytic object through which to explore the thorny questions of property, gender, enclosure, and mobility—questions that enrich and complicate the study of fugitive geographies and their use as models for escaping and living outside of the violent enclosures of gendered racial capitalism. The multivalence of the rooftop provides an opportunity to dwell with the complex questions of fugitive method: What forms do geographies of fugitivity take? Who do they limit or enable? And under what conditions? How do fugitive geographies both sustain and break from the social, political, and economic relations from which their producers flee?

When extractive and racial capitalism combine – Indigenous and caste based struggles with land, labour and law in India

While the Government of India has made numerous statements about its ‘green’ credentials, extractive capitalism continues at an escalating pace across the country under increasingly brutal authoritarianism. This paper provides a case study of extractive capitalism in Adivasi and Dalit communities in Birbhum, West Bengal, in an area dominated by stone crusher industries. Through this example, this article argues that extractive capitalism combines with racial capitalism, resulting in devastating consequences in modern India. These effects can be seen in the concurrent violence enacted against Adivasi and Dalit land and labour under a law which is discriminatory and disciplinary. Drawing on Dalit feminist literature and the work of scholars on caste and racial capitalism, this paper illustrates that exploitation can only occur through mainstream disgust for Adivasis and Dalits – attempting to extract not only from their land, but from their bodies also. Yet these findings show that Adivasis and Dalits also clearly demonstrate resistance to psychological subjugation. This paper thus provides unique insights into the way that racial and extractive capitalism intersect in India.

Retelling education in emergencies through the black radical tradition: on racial capitalism, critical race theory and fugitivity

ABSTRACT This article asserts that the Black Radical Tradition (BRT), grounded in historical and structural inquiry, offers tools to reinterpret EiE radically—the BRT encompasses a tradition rooted in diverse African intellectual and activist inquiries, providing a multifaceted theoretical framework. Relevant to humanitarian scholarship, the BRT challenges omissions of colonisation, capitalism, and enslavement histories in forced migration and aid, shedding light on their roles in perpetuating ‘white saviours’. The paper, adopting my roles as a scholar and aid practitioner, critically examines the EiE sector through three BRT lenses: racial capitalism, critical race theory, and fugitivity. It employs case studies, aligning with the BRT's interconnected focus, revealing the pervasive influence of educational aid, racial injustice, and structural inequalities. These lenses collectively illuminate the potential of Black radical thought to transform the EiE landscape. By tracing EiE's genealogies through Black radical historiography, the article advocates for sector-wide introspection, emphasising power redistribution, centring marginalised voices, and challenging prevailing hierarchies in humanitarian contexts.

Climate change and educational research: Mapping resistances and futurities

Given that human-caused climate change is one of the defining educational contexts in the 21st Century, we ask this question of ourselves and our educational research community: What is the role of education and educational research as we attempt to “cultivate equitable educational systems” in a world dominated by climate breakdown and related emergencies? We suggest our scholarly community needs to examine the systems and ideologies that are responsible for climate change: human supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and white supremacy, among others. The perpetuation of these ideas via educational institutions and practices is a significant part of the problem that has led to the current climate crisis. Therefore, the aim of this special issue of Research in Education is to draw together scholarship that can help map out potential roles of education in both the possibilities and resistances of addressing climate change. Collectively the papers map possible and much-needed educational futures where climate change is a matter of urgent superordinate concern including through enacting resistance to human-centrism, coloniality, racial capitalism, and their interconnections. In these futures, climate change education inquires - at multiple scales - into possibilities for materializing less extractive and more livable worlds through education policy and data infrastructures to youth coalitions and even the small everyday encounters with the more-than-human world. The papers also illustrate the potentials of climate change pedagogical orientations that are affective, interdisciplinary and intergenerational. We hope this special issue prompts our colleagues to consider how the collective work of educational scholarship might produce desirable futures amid a rapidly changing climate.

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and Black Higher Education Administrators: Reflections on Illusions of Change

Over the past two decades, universities and colleges in Canada have increasingly styled themselves as being deeply invested in addressing anti-Black racism, coloniality, and histories of exclusion. To address these long-standing grievances, academic institutions have ramped up and mass-promoted the implementation of equity-focused initiatives such as equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) offices; executive-level EDI positions; race-based data collection; EDI working groups; subcommittees and councils; anti-racism charters; statements of solidarity; and EDI training and workshops. In this article, the author argues that these efforts have done nothing to meaningfully address entrenched inequities present at every level of academic institutions. Of particular focus is the role of the Black administrator, who, the author argues, is hired to nullify dissent within the institution while manufacturing optics of diversity and progress. Drawing on the author’s own experience as a former college dean, this article first provides examples of how these strategies amount to a nullification of dissent. The author argues that universities and colleges have become sophisticated in stifling legitimate challenges to hierarchies of power through incorporating and co-opting calls for change. The author shows how such practices not only undermine radical demands for change but also provide ways for institutions to maintain their racial capitalist, neoliberal objectives. In thinking about what may yet be possible in “another university,” the author reviews a set of principles derived from Black radical tradition and Black queer feminist theory, which point to ways in which we may move toward an alternative learning commons or what others refer to as the “off-university” or the “undercommons.” Extending on the concepts of the “Black test” and an “ethics of care,” the author suggests some fundamental criteria for moving toward transformed academic institutions while also addressing ways in which we can rethink notions of Black leadership that are too often deployed to frustrate calls for change.

Health and safety of labor migrants in food industries during Covid-19: Germany, Netherlands and USA

Abstract During the Covid-19 pandemic, migrant workers in the food supply chain (FSC) were deemed an essential workforce. At the same time, they were particularly exposed to risks as shown by Covid-19 outbreaks, for example in meat-processing plants. The pandemic has thus highlighted preexisting inequities related to precarious migrant labor in the FSC. We use the Covid-19 pandemic as a showcase to comparatively examine occupational safety and health (OSH) protection gaps for migrant workers in agriculture and meat-processing in Illinois/USA, the Netherlands, and North-Rhine Westphalia/Germany. We conducted harmonized policy analyses of OSH policies for migrant workers generally, and of pandemic measures specifically. The policy analysis was complemented by expert consultations. The Covid-19 syndemic has prompted OSH measures in horticulture and meat-processing. However, our analysis demonstrates the reliance of FSC industries on various precariously employed worker groups. Intersecting health-, work- and migration-related factors led to poor adaptation of policies for some of these groups, including instances where protective measures excluded them or exacerbated their marginalization. Our analysis shows how influence peddling prevents better protection of workers in some contexts. But it also identifies positive policy changes; for instance the prohibition of subcontracting in meat-processing in Germany. Across different contexts, agriculture remains problematic, with major evidence gaps on migrant workers’ conditions. Comprehensive improvements in the social and health protection of migrant workers in FSC industries will require tackling the structural causes of migrant workers’ exploitability, including low visibility, racial capitalism and cronyism; intersectoral action on OSH; stronger enforcement; and firewalling data exchange between OSH and immigration agencies.

Origins of the Flint Water Crisis: Uneven Development, Urban Political Ecology, and Racial Capitalism

What conditions gave rise to the Flint Water Crisis? Students of contemporary urban disasters tend to advance two claims, increasingly in tandem. First, preexisting racial and class inequalities structure both the impact of disasters on urban communities and the dynamics of resettlement. Second and similarly, neoliberalism (variously theorized as neoliberal urbanism and the growth machine) prefigures urban disasters and underpins an ensuing market-oriented process of redevelopment. While long-standing patterns of inequality and neoliberalization are important contextual factors, by themselves they tend to undertheorize the timing and ecological content of urban crises. In this article, we synthesize the literature on uneven development, urban political ecology, and racial capitalism to advance an alternative hypothesis. Drawing on interviews with Flint residents and Michigan officials, the archival correspondence of government agencies, and ethnographic data, we argue that the Flint Water Crisis was the consequence of an extractivist project of White state and suburban actors to “regionalize” and thereby expropriate the assets and natural resources controlled by the predominantly Black working-class city of Detroit. Specifically, the formation of two regional water authorities required that Flint leave the Detroit Water and Sewer Department for an interim water source, the Flint River, which had been contaminated by decades of automotive toxins.

Social Reproduction Theory and Racial Capitalism

Mary-Jo Nadeau’s scholarship and politics deepened our understanding of the ways in which capitalism is built on social oppression. That insight is also at the heart of two renewed and burgeoning intellectual traditions: social reproduction theory (SRT) and abolition feminism. This article reads two powerful analyses of racial capitalism, Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) and Reckoning with Slavery by Jennifer Morgan (2021) , through an SRT lens. It stresses that these books document, on the one hand, the modern and colonial states’ organization of Black peoples’ life-making labours and, on the other hand, forms of resistance involving Black women’s individual and collective control over the conditions of social reproduction. In centring social reproduction in the analysis of the integral relation between class and race, and in strategizing resistance to capitalism, these accounts help to refine and concretize social reproduction feminist thinking about the state, alienation, and anti-oppression, anti-capitalist politics.

Centering Race in Studies of Low-Wage Immigrant Labor

This review examines the historical and contemporary factors driving immigrant worker precarity and the central role of race in achieving worker justice. We build from the framework of racial capitalism and historicize the legacies of African enslavement and Indigenous dispossession, which have cemented an exclusionary economic system in the United States and globally. We consider how racism and colonial legacies create migrant displacement and shape the experiences of immigrant workers. We also detail how racism permeates the immigration bureaucracy, driving migrant worker precarity. The traditional labor movement has played an important role in closing this gap, but increasingly so have worker centers and the immigrant rights movement as a whole. These partnerships have had to navigate coalitional tensions as they build new strategies for realizing immigrant worker rights.

The caring classes: A socio-demographic and occupational analysis of caring values

In the past, the working class was perceived as a cohesive social and political subject, although this was never fully the case, and it is certainly less the case today. Class, in fact, is not just defined by economic attributes, but also by social, cultural and ethical ones. Care, understood either as work or values, is fundamental for better understanding class. The implications of the relationship between care values and class are yet not fully understood. In this article, building on David Graeber’s intuition regarding the caring classes, we theorise and statistically explore the existence of a working-class care ethos by examining which socio-demographic and occupational groups share care values. Using European Social Survey (ESS) data and ordinal logistic regressions, we test to what extent self-perceptions of care for others are associated with occupational/working profiles and socio-demographic characteristics. We find that caring for others is a value shared, transversally, by an intersection of different individuals who experience a few conditions of subalternity in the context of patriarchal and racial capitalism; a left-wing political orientation and a background of political/union organising; some specific occupational profiles marked by interpersonal interaction; and, most significantly, by explicit forms of care work. We conclude by speculating that the concept of caring classes can be a useful one towards a fertile terrain of political struggle.

Climate change as a threat multiplier to environmental reproductive justice

Legacies of racial capitalism and colonialism drive present day racial disparities in perinatal health outcomes. Climate change amplifies existing social inequalities associated with environmental exposures and reproductive health, of which BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities bear a disproportionate burden. Through case studies, this article summarizes three examples of climate justice issues with reproductive healthcare outcomes: traffic related air pollution exposure, chemical exposures in personal care products and plastics, and natural disaster frequency. We advocate for incorporation of climate justice and environmental health impact into medical school curriculum, increased prenatal screening for environmental toxins, and physician engagement with local environmental issues.

A Racial Theory of Labour: Racial Capitalism from Colonial Slavery to Postcolonial Migration

Abstract A reconsideration of the crucial historical role of slavery in the consolidation of the global regime of capital accumulation provides a vital source of Marxian critique for our postcolonial present. The Atlantic slave trade literally transformed African men and women into human commodities. The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or ‘human capital’ – indeed, into labour and nothing but labour – which was the very essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary prerequisite for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called ‘labour in the abstract’, and requires us to re-situate enslaved labour as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labour as such under capitalism. The production of labour in the abstract, or labour ‘in general’, depended nonetheless upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race. The term ‘Black’, which was devised to literally and figuratively brand the flesh of enslaved people, was also contrived to signify their particular sociopolitical condition of brutal degradation as the ultimate limit for the subjugation of labour. Blackness names that limit. Thus, Blackness is in fact necessary for apprehending labour as such under capitalism. Marx’s scathing critique of wage labour is always haunted by the long shadow of slavery as its limit figure. If we comprehend labour to be the antithesis of capital, then to the extent that Blackness names the ultimate condition of labour’s subordination and subjection to capital, we need to recognise the tendency for all labour under capital to be pressed toward a sociopolitical condition of Blackness (or approximating Blackness), where Blackness does not name any kind of essential identity but the racialised sociopolitical condition of that subordination/subjection. Consequently, the labour theory of value – which has always been in fact, more accurately, a value theory of labour – must be complemented with what we might posit to be a racial theory of labour. Such an ostensibly historical perspective on the foundational role of slavery in the genesis of capitalism is no mere scholastic exercise in the historiography of ‘primitive accumulation’, however, but rather must be re-purposed toward the ends of elaborating what has remained an as-yet underdeveloped Marxian theory of migrant labour. Extrapolating key insights from Marx’s corpus for the formulation of a racial theory of labour, this essay is ultimately concerned with the ways that slavery supplies capitalism with a defining horizon for all labour, and thus how this insight might instructively serve to comprehend the racialised subordination of migrant labour within our global/postcolonial sociopolitical order.

Critical Feminist Approaches to Migration and Mobility Justice in Canada: Guest Editors' Introduction

<p>This themed section examines how inequality constrain and enable contemporary human movement at state border crossings. It responds directly to questions, practices, and knowledge gaps that arise from critical migration/refugee studies, critical tourism studies, border studies, and/or mobility justice research by denaturalizing assumptions about the rights of some to choose to move across borders freely and others who are forced to leave, denied access, or detained. In so doing, we highlight research on human mobilities and borders in Canada to advance understandings on the dynamics of territorial control and access to state borders. What links the articles is the commitment to examining the reproduction of power through the following three shared understandings and starting points: (1) a critique of the Canadian nation state’s global reputation as exceptionally humanitarian (Nguyen and Phu 2021); (2) a consideration of the global entanglements of racial capitalism and colonialism that structures human movement (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018); and (3) an understanding that the mobilities of some and the immobilities of others coexist and are in fact co-produced (Ahmed et al. 2020; Bauman 1998; Sheller 2018).</p><p> </p>

Food oppression in the United Kingdom: A study of structural race and income-based food access inequalities

In 2007, Freeman pioneered the phrase “food oppression” to capture the state’s perpetuation of socioeconomic and racial disparities in nutrient consumption and diet-related diseases in the United States. Amid an increasing awareness of the impact of intersecting identities in all facets of life, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, this article argues that food oppression is an equally applicable, and necessary, characterization of the unequal enjoyment of the right to food in the United Kingdom. Patterns of food insecurity—chiefly, the overrepresentation of Black households among food bank users—are tied back to the austerity measures enacted by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition Government in response to the 2007/2008 financial crisis. These findings illuminate the race- and class-based barriers to access to adequate food in the United Kingdom that predate the pandemic as a manifestation of racial capitalism yet have increased in prominence. The article concludes that the adoption of a rights-based approach to household food security by the state is necessary to formulate policies that target the commodification of food and ensure a nutritious diet is available to all without discrimination.

Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism and the uses of historical geography

Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition is one of the key sources of the idea of ‘racial capitalism’ and offers an important account of the lineage of Black radical thought. It is argued here that central to Robinson's development of these ideas is the setting out of the different historical geographies of capitalism and Black people's resistance to oppression. This argument is pursued through a detailed reading of the historical geographical imagination central to Black Marxism that shows how Robinson deploys different historical geographies, and to what effect. The case is made that Robinson uses historical geographical analysis to effect shifts in ways of seeing race, capitalism and politics which work to decentre capitalism as the focus of analysis and, correspondingly, direct attention to the continuities and connections within Black political cultures of opposition to oppression. The conclusion draws out the implications of this for historical and geographical work on racial capitalism and resistance.

Living and dying in the shadow of coal: Relocating social death and its contestations in Lephalale

Marapong, “place of bones”, is situated in the shadow of the coal-fired Matimba Power Station and Grootegeluk coal mine in Lephalale, northern South Africa. Marapong was named after the bones of a local woman, Salaminah Moloantoa, which were found during the development of Grootegeluk in 1973. That same year her bones were buried on Naawontkomen farm where she had lived. Thirty-four years later with the construction of coal-fired Medupi Power Station, Moloantoa’s bones became the site of industrial construction again in this current iteration of extractivism. Working from two provocations that emerged during fieldwork – we are dead here and the mines turn our lives upside down – I relocate social death and its relation to different kinds of violence that constitute racial capitalism in this city of coal. In so doing, I engage with literature on Afropessimism, the black radical tradition, and land and ancestral struggles and argue for reconceptualising social death as grounded in place and time rather than a totalising ontological condition. Such a rereading emphasises relationality and the processes of contestation over land, life, and death, that open up futures beyond that of bones becoming coal for fossil fuel development.