Histories of Racial Capitalism

As one of many examples of academic theory borrowed from social movements, “racial capitalism” was first articulated by anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Racial capitalism is thus the product of a global system of colonization, and “race” itself a multiplicity of expressions. Histories of racial capitalism produced in the United States, however, have tended to remain contained within the United States and a Black/white definition of race. That story begins with slavery and moves through emancipation, segregation, redlining, and the creation of racial geographies and structural mechanisms of the production of property in whiteness. This is all essential work. Nonetheless, without the global context, US histories of racial capitalism can suffer from misalignment with Indigenous dispossession and settler colonization, erasing Indigenous people from land and from history.Histories of Racial Capitalism breaks from that beaten path. This outstanding book makes a modest claim to demonstrate through history that race is constitutive of capitalism. In fact, it does much more than that. It models a number of specific approaches, a new “methodological practice,” that repositions US racial capitalism in the broader history of global colonization (10).Racial capitalism is defined here not as a subfield of the study of capitalism but as the “process by which the key dynamics of capitalism—accumulation/dispossession, contract/coercion, and others—become articulated through race” (10). The process has two entwined parts: violent dispossession leads to the creation of new racial distinctions, which in turn naturalizes racial inequalities. This understanding of racial capitalism as a dynamic process contrasts with the earlier Black radical tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Barbara Fields, C. L. R. James, and Cedric Robinson. This book draws heavily on that foundation but charts a new course that disengages from the “race first” or “class first” debate (10). While this new iteration critiques capitalism in a Marxist tradition, it rejects Marx's progressive theory of history. Borrowing from Patrick Wolfe, racial capitalism is presented here not as an event but as a “structuring logic,” one in which primitive accumulation is not a stage of capitalist development but “an ongoing organizing principle of capitalist social order” (11).Debt is a theme that demonstrates this continuity. K-Sue Park describes debt as a weapon in the hands of British settlers, who gained title to Indigenous peoples’ lands through loan defaults. Race was thus imagined into being as a means to facilitate unequal power between Indigenous people that held legal rights to land and European settlers. Thus, it was in the era of formal colonization that the mechanism of debt was invented for displacement in America. Land itself was transformed from a living thing to a commodity. In his essay, Destin Jenkins demonstrates the role of debt in the realignment of the white North and South after the end of Reconstruction. The South faced two main challenges to securing northern investment: Jim Crow segregation led to racial violence; and southern cities had defaulted on loans during and after the Civil War and had to convince northern investors that future investment was secure. Borrowing became a property of whiteness through propaganda to establish credibility in white loan repayment, what Du Bois called a “worldwide investment in color prejudice” (187). The propaganda obscured the necessity of Black labor to the New South economy. In both of these examples, debt was a means of producing race, and race nimbly adapted to this historical context.Several chapters explore the interrelatedness of the commodification of land and of labor. Ryan Cecil Jobson reads Du Bois's Black Reconstruction as a critical theory of energy. Manu Karuka also looks to Black Reconstruction and the history of the Southern Pacific Railroad to reveal the role of the new industrial mining and agriculture economy in the southwestern region in the defeat of Reconstruction. Land was at the heart of this counterrevolution in property, as finance capital and the US Army brought a transfer of power from the old slaveholding oligarchy to new agribusiness (137). The story includes the displacement of the Quechan and other Indigenous peoples from the Colorado River in the course of a new “layering” of colonization. Karuka sees in Du Bois's analysis “guidance for a critique of settler colonialism” (135). However, such a critique should engage with the layering of colonization of the land in the Southeast coveted by freedmen, which for Du Bois would form the basis of the multiracial democracy. That land would have embedded the “fossilized labor” of the six tribes illegally and violently removed just decades before. The book as a whole creates space for alignment of racial capitalism and settler colonialism through its approach to periodization. All the chapters demonstrate a continuity of colonization. The book critiques an automatic assumption of the legitimacy of US law on top of occupied land.Shauna Sweeney offers another possible avenue to alignment with Indigenous histories, arguing that Black women contributed to the Black radical tradition by sustaining spirituality, including spiritual connectedness to land. Drawing on Cedric Robinson, she says it was maroonage, flight from slavery, that birthed a “political philosophy at odds with racial capitalism” (65).Sweeney's chapter is also the only one that recognizes gender, which is a serious flaw. Gender, among other things, is a Western cultural production invented for the explicit purpose of producing racial capitalism. Using this definition, gender, like race, is created anew in multiple contexts to make invisible the extraction of labor value from certain human beings also inevitably defined by race. Sweeney's chapter demonstrates that gender understood in this way leads to new and necessary ways of knowing the Black radical tradition.That point notwithstanding, one of the most exciting elements of this book is its presentation of race as a multiplicity of local articulations. Thus, though it focuses primarily on America and its colonies, it decenters that history within a larger story of global colonization. Mishal Khan describes the stratification of labor under colonization in India as one example of this. Interestingly, Khan argues that the Western movement for abolition of slavery, and the “vocabulary of freedom” it promoted, led to new forms of bonded labor in India and thus to new racializations. Allen Lumba finds a fascinating resonance between the logic of US settler-colonial policy and that deployed in the “extractive colonies,” including the Philippines (112). Pedro Regalado describes the seizure of racial capital by Latinx elites by manipulating “the racial malleability of ‘Hispanicity’” to produce themselves as a (new) racial category distinct from others defined as “black” (233). While this chapter is place bound within the United States, it probes a theme of racial stratification within “races” that resonates with Global South experience.Together, the stories presented in this book call for a challenge to the progressive narrative of Western history itself, articulated most directly by Justin Leroy. What racial capitalism offers is a “productive” contradiction that exposes the progressive narrative to be in fact a product of capitalism, because the functioning of what we identify as racial capitalism is not just a means to “hyperexploitation” of people identified racially; it is “how race naturalizes the tensions inherent to capitalism's logic of forward progress” (180). Racial capitalism “offers itself as a black philosophy of history” that is inherently “a rebellion against strict periodization” (181). To apply this insight is to approach anew the meaning of emancipation with fresh questions. Leroy suggests that “if slavery is capitalism, then of course abolition would be communism” (180). Abolition might also be a reknitting of people and land through a society built on the model of the maroon communities, and on a view of land as alive within Indigenous epistemologies rather than as a lifeless commodity.