Racial Capitalism

Introduction

Racial capitalism refers to the inseparable relationship between capitalism and racism—the thesis that capitalism from its inception has been fundamentally racial, using race to organize exploitation, accumulation, and social hierarchies. Rather than treating racism as ideological prejudice or cultural phenomenon separate from economic structures, racial capitalism analyzes race and racism as constitutive features of capitalist political economy itself.

The concept was developed by Cedric Robinson in his landmark 1983 book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Robinson argued that capitalism didn’t emerge in contrast to earlier racial and ethnic hierarchies but carried them forward, using racial differentiation to fragment labor, justify exploitation, and structure global hierarchies of extraction and development. Capitalism is racial capitalism—there’s no capitalism without racism organizing who can be exploited, where value can be extracted, and how populations are hierarchized.

This framework challenges orthodox Marxism’s tendency to prioritize class over race, treating racism as ideological superstructure derivative from economic base or as “divide and conquer” tactic secondary to capitalist exploitation. Racial capitalism insists race is not epiphenomenal to capitalism but fundamental—constitutive of categories like labor, property, and value themselves. Understanding capitalism requires understanding racism; fighting capitalism requires fighting racism; and vice versa.

Key Figures

Related Thinkers:

• Cedric Robinson (1940-2016) - Foundational theorist in Black Marxism (1983)
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore (1950-present) - “Racism is the state-sanctioned vulnerability to premature death”
• Robin D.G. Kelley (1962-present) - Black radical tradition, capitalism and race
• Angela Davis (1944-present) - Abolition, prison-industrial complex
• W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) - Black Reconstruction, wages of whiteness

📖 Essential Reading: Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983, 2000 edition)

Historical Development

Pre-Capitalist European Racialism

Robinson’s crucial insight was that European capitalism emerged from societies already structured by racialist thinking. Medieval Europe constructed internal hierarchies through concepts of blood purity, ethnic origin, and civilizational status. Jews, Roma, Moors, Slavs, and various European ethnic groups were racialized—treated as inherently different, inferior, and dangerous.

The Reconquista (Christian conquest of Islamic Iberia, completed 1492) and subsequent Inquisition established “blood purity” (limpieza de sangre) as organizing principle. Christians of Moorish or Jewish descent were treated as contaminated regardless of religious conversion—biological inheritance determined status. This prefigured modern racism’s biological determinism.

Similarly, English colonization of Ireland (16th-17th centuries) racialized the Irish as savage, inferior, and requiring violent civilization. English settlers treated Irish as racially distinct—not quite human—justifying dispossession, violence, and exploitative labor extraction. Ireland functioned as laboratory for colonial techniques later deployed globally.

Robinson argued that capitalism didn’t break with these racialisms but absorbed and systematized them. Racial hierarchy wasn’t invented for capitalism; capitalism seized upon and intensified existing European racialisms to organize new systems of extraction and accumulation.

The Atlantic Slave Trade and Plantation Slavery

The Atlantic slave trade (16th-19th centuries) and plantation slavery represent racial capitalism’s foundational violence. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas; 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage. They provided unfree labor generating enormous wealth for European and American capitalism.

Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) argued that slavery was not pre-capitalist remnant but integral to capitalism’s development. Profits from slave trade and plantation production financed industrial revolution. Insurance, shipping, banking, and manufacturing industries depended on slavery. Manchester’s textile mills processed slave-grown cotton; Liverpool’s merchants financed slave voyages; London’s financial sector underwrote plantation mortgages.

Crucially, slavery required racial ideology to justify. Why enslave Africans specifically? Why treat humans as property? Racism provided answers: Africans were claimed to be subhuman, naturally suited to slavery, incapable of civilization. This wasn’t pre-existing prejudice applied to slavery but racism produced through slavery’s demands. Capitalism needed slavery; slavery needed racism; racism was forged in slavery’s crucible.

The plantation itself was modern capitalist enterprise: rationalized labor processes, systematic violence, scientific management, global market integration. Enslaved people produced commodities (sugar, cotton, tobacco) for international markets; plantations operated for profit maximization; innovations in accounting, management, and violence maximized extraction. Slavery was capitalism, organized through race.

Colonialism and Imperial Extraction

European colonialism (16th-20th centuries) extended racial capitalism globally. Colonizers extracted resources, exploited labor, and appropriated land across Africa, Asia, and Latin America through violence justified by racism. Indigenous peoples were conquered, dispossessed, and often genocided; their lands became property; their labor was extracted; their societies were destroyed or subordinated.

Colonialism wasn’t separate from capitalism but its spatial form. Capitalism required external sources of wealth—what Marx called “primitive accumulation.” Colonialism provided this through:

• Resource extraction: Gold, silver, rubber, oil, minerals stolen from colonized lands
• Labor exploitation: Enslaved, indentured, or coercively recruited colonized workers
• Land appropriation: Indigenous territories became colonial property
• Market creation: Colonized regions forced to buy metropolitan products

All this required racial ideology. Why could Europeans appropriate others’ lands? Racism: Indigenous peoples were “savages” without real property systems. Why could Europeans violently exploit colonized labor? Racism: colonized peoples were inferior, lazy, requiring discipline. Why were Europeans entitled to rule others? Racism: racial hierarchy made Europeans naturally superior.

Post-Emancipation Racial Capitalism

U.S. slavery’s formal abolition (1865) didn’t end racial capitalism but transformed it. Reconstruction (1865-1877) briefly promised Black political and economic power, but white supremacist reaction—KKK terrorism, Black Codes, sharecropping systems—reestablished racial hierarchy through different means.

Sharecropping trapped formerly enslaved people in debt peonage—working white-owned land for shares of crops but perpetually indebted through exploitative contracts. Convict leasing sold primarily Black prisoners to private companies as forced labor. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation, disenfranchisement, and economic subordination. Lynching terrorized Black communities into submission.

This demonstrates racial capitalism’s flexibility. When chattel slavery became politically untenable, racial capitalism adapted: criminalizing Blackness, using law to create unfree labor, structuring labor markets racially. The form changed (from slavery to convict leasing, sharecropping, segregated wage labor) but racial hierarchy organizing exploitation persisted.

20th Century: Welfare Exclusion and Urban Segregation

New Deal programs (1930s-40s) that built white middle-class wealth systematically excluded Black Americans through racist design. Social Security initially excluded domestic and agricultural workers—occupations where Black workers concentrated. Federal Housing Administration redlining denied mortgages in Black neighborhoods, preventing Black homeownership while subsidizing white suburban wealth. GI Bill benefits were administered locally, enabling Southern states to deny Black veterans access.

These programs created U.S. middle class but as racial formation. The social democratic policies that orthodox Marxism celebrates as working-class victories were actually white working-class victories, excluding Black, Latino, and Asian workers from benefits. Welfare state was racial state.

Urban segregation and white flight (1950s-70s) further entrenched racial capitalism. As Black Americans migrated North seeking industrial jobs, white residents fled to suburbs, taking tax base with them. Cities deindustrialized as capital relocated, leaving Black communities with declining employment, crumbling infrastructure, and concentrated poverty. This wasn’t natural economic evolution but racial restructuring of space and opportunity.

Neoliberalism and Carceral Capitalism (1980s-Present)

Neoliberalism intensified racial capitalism through:

• Mass incarceration: War on Drugs targeted Black communities, creating 2+ million person prison system disproportionately Black and Latino. Prisons function as warehouses for surplus racialized labor and sites of exploitative prison labor.
• Financial predation: Subprime mortgages targeted Black homeowners, stripping equity through predatory lending. 2008 foreclosure crisis destroyed 50%+ of Black household wealth.
• Labor casualization: Deindustrialization and service sector growth created precarious low-wage work concentrated among workers of color.
• Welfare retrenchment: Social program cuts hit Black communities hardest, replaced with punitive surveillance and policing.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Racial capitalism creates conditions where racialized populations systematically face earlier death through environmental racism, police violence, healthcare inequities, poverty, and abandonment.

Key Concepts

Race as Organizing Principle of Capitalism

Racial capitalism’s core claim: race isn’t secondary to class but is how class is organized under capitalism. Labor markets are racially segmented (racialized workers concentrated in worst jobs); property is racialized (who can own what, where); value is racialized (whose labor is valued, whose devalued); citizenship is racialized (who counts as legitimate political subject).

This means you cannot understand capitalism without understanding race. Why are some nations wealthy and others poor? Racial capitalism: centuries of colonial extraction, structured into global economic system. Why do some workers earn more than others? Racial capitalism: racialized labor hierarchies, discriminatory hiring, segmented labor markets.

Racial Differentiation and Labor Segmentation

Capitalism uses racial differentiation to fragment working class, preventing solidarity that might challenge exploitation. By creating racial hierarchies among workers—white workers paid more, given better jobs, granted political rights—capital divides those who might otherwise unite.

But this isn’t merely “divide and conquer” tactic. Racial differentiation is structural feature of labor markets. Capital accumulates through differentially exploiting racially segmented labor pools: enslaved Black workers, indentured Asian workers, “guest worker” programs, global supply chains in racialized Global South. Racial hierarchy enables differential exploitation rates fundamental to capitalist accumulation.

Racial Regimes of Accumulation

Different periods of capitalism develop distinct racial regimes—historically specific ways race organizes accumulation:

• Slavery: Direct ownership of racialized people as property
• Colonialism: Territorial control and extraction from racialized populations
• Jim Crow/Apartheid: Legal segregation and disenfranchisement enabling super-exploitation
• Mass incarceration: Criminalization and imprisonment as racialized labor control
• Neoliberal exclusion: Financial predation, spatial containment, managed death

These aren’t progressive stages but overlapping, co-existing forms. Contemporary capitalism combines elements: prison labor, special economic zones in Global South, debt peonage, and more.

Racialized Proletarianization

Marx described proletarianization—peasants losing land access, becoming dependent on wage labor—as central to capitalism’s emergence. But this process was always racialized. European peasants became “free” wage laborers with political rights; colonized peoples became unfree labor (enslaved, indentured, coerced); women performed unpaged social reproduction; Indigenous peoples faced genocide and dispossession.

Capitalism created hierarchical working class with dramatically different relationships to capital and state. White male workers could organize unions, vote, own property. Black workers faced criminalization, terror, and exclusion. Women’s reproductive labor remained unwaged. Indigenous peoples were eliminated as obstacles to accumulation.

Property as Racial Category

Property rights are deeply racialized. Who can own land? Historically, white settlers could claim Indigenous land as property; Indigenous peoples couldn’t claim it as their own. Enslaved people were property, incapable of owning property. After emancipation, discriminatory laws, violence, and financial exclusion prevented Black property ownership.

Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property” argues whiteness itself functions as property—conferring rights, benefits, and privileges. White skin grants access to opportunities, protections, and wealth denied to racialized others. This property interest in whiteness shapes law, policy, and resistance to racial justice (white opposition to civil rights represented defense of property interest in whiteness).

Surplus Populations and Social Death

Racial capitalism produces racialized surplus populations—people capital no longer needs as workers but hasn’t eliminated. These populations face what Gilmore calls “organized abandonment”: denied employment, social services, infrastructure, while facing intense policing, criminalization, and premature death.

Mass incarceration manages these surplus populations, warehousing them through prison rather than employing them. Prisons extract value through prison labor, phone contracts, commissary, and control functions but primarily exist to contain populations capital has discarded.

Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death” describes slavery’s fundamental violence: severing enslaved people from kinship, community, and social existence, making them legally and socially dead. Racial capitalism continues producing social death through different means: criminalization, immigration detention, abandonment in segregated spaces.

Racial States

Rather than class-neutral states captured by capital, racial capitalism produces racial states—states structured to create and maintain racial hierarchies. U.S. state was founded through indigenous genocide, African slavery, and white male citizenship; these aren’t aberrations but foundations.

State functions—law enforcement, immigration control, welfare administration, education, housing policy—systematically produce and maintain racial inequality. This isn’t accidental or correctable through inclusion; racial hierarchy is state’s purpose, not malfunction.

Contemporary Manifestations

Global Supply Chains

Contemporary capitalism relies on global supply chains exploiting racialized workers in Global South—garment workers in Bangladesh, electronics assemblers in China, agricultural workers in Latin America, miners in Africa. These workers labor in dangerous conditions for poverty wages, producing commodities consumed in Global North.

This represents continuation of colonial extraction through new mechanisms. Rather than formal political control, multinational corporations control through market power, subcontracting chains that obscure responsibility, and backing from international financial institutions imposing “structural adjustment.”

The racialization is evident: overwhelmingly workers of color in former colonies producing goods for overwhelmingly white consumers in former colonizers. Global inequality maps almost perfectly onto colonial history—racial capitalism’s geographic form.

Mass Incarceration and Prison Industrial Complex

U.S. imprisonment rate quintupled since 1980, with Black Americans incarcerated at 5x white rate, Latinos at 1.3x. This represents racialized response to deindustrialization, neoliberalism, and urban crisis. Rather than employment and social services, capital and state chose criminalization and incarceration.

Prisons generate profits through: prison labor (often paid pennies per hour), communications contracts (exorbitant phone rates), commissary monopolies, private prison corporations, and bonds financing prison construction. But primary function isn’t profit but managing surplus racialized populations through violent containment.

Financial Racism

2008 financial crisis disproportionately devastated Black and Latino wealth through predatory lending targeting communities of color. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and others deliberately marketed subprime mortgages to Black borrowers who qualified for prime loans—extracting wealth through differential, exploitative terms.

Foreclosures destroyed 240,000+ Black-owned homes. Black household wealth fell 50%+; Latino wealth fell 65%+. This wasn’t unfortunate side effect but targeted extraction—racial capitalism’s financial form.

Ongoing financial racism includes: payday lenders concentrated in Black neighborhoods, higher interest rates for Black borrowers even controlling for credit, exclusion from banking (forcing use of expensive check-cashing services), and targeted credit card and student loan debt.

Environmental Racism

Polluting industries, toxic waste dumps, and environmental hazards are systematically located in Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities. Flint, Michigan’s lead-poisoned water; Cancer Alley (petrochemical plants in Black Louisiana communities); uranium mining on Indigenous lands—all exemplify environmental racism.

This is racial capitalism: treating racialized communities’ health and land as disposable, extracting profits while externalizing costs onto those with least political power. Environmental racism enables capital accumulation through differential exposure to death and injury.

Climate change represents global environmental racism. Global South nations (least responsible for emissions) suffer worst impacts while Global North (most responsible) has resources to adapt. Within nations, poor communities and communities of color face greatest vulnerability.

Militarized Borders and Immigration Enforcement

Border enforcement and immigration detention exemplify racial capitalism’s violence. Borders aren’t natural but political constructs determining who can access life chances. Enforcement disproportionately targets people of color from Global South seeking better lives or fleeing conditions created by Northern capitalism.

Immigration detention is carceral system paralleling mass incarceration—private prison companies profit from detaining immigrants in brutal conditions. Family separation, children in cages, deaths in custody—this violence serves racial capitalism by creating precarious, exploitable immigrant labor pools.

“Guest worker” programs similarly exemplify racial capitalism: temporary visas for racialized workers without paths to citizenship, creating hyper-exploitable workforce with minimal rights. These workers can be deported for organizing, face wage theft with limited recourse, and live in constant precarity.

Platform Capitalism’s Racial Dimensions

Platform capitalism reproduces racial hierarchies through:

• Gig work: Uber, DoorDash, etc. disproportionately employ workers of color in precarious, low-paid work
• Algorithmic bias: AI systems encode and amplify racism in hiring, lending, policing, facial recognition
• Digital divide: Unequal internet access maps onto racial and class hierarchies
• Content moderation: Traumatic work of moderating violent content is outsourced to workers of color in Global South
• Surveillance: Platform surveillance disproportionately harms communities of color already facing over-policing

Pandemic Political Economy

COVID-19 revealed racial capitalism’s deadly logic. Essential workers (disproportionately Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian) faced maximum exposure with minimum protection. They couldn’t work from home, lacked paid sick leave, and risked jobs if they stayed home.

Death rates were 2-3x higher for Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities—not due to biological difference but social determinants: essential work, crowded housing, lack of healthcare access, chronic conditions from environmental racism and poverty, and unequal treatment in healthcare systems.

Vaccine distribution similarly followed racial hierarchies. Globally, wealthy white-majority nations hoarded vaccines while Global South nations waited. Domestically, barriers to access (transportation, time off work, immigration status concerns) delayed vaccination for communities of color.

Intersections

Gender and Reproductive Labor

Racial capitalism is inseparable from gendered exploitation. Social reproduction—care work, domestic labor, child-rearing—is disproportionately performed by women of color, often as paid domestic workers in white households. This labor is devalued, underpaid or unpaid, and essential to capitalism yet rendered invisible.

Enslaved Black women’s forced reproduction produced more enslaved workers—their children were property. Reproductive control continues through: forced sterilization (targeting Black, Indigenous, disabled, and imprisoned women), restrictions on abortion access, and removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools or foster care. Racial capitalism controls racialized women’s reproduction.

Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism—where colonizers seek to replace Indigenous peoples, not just exploit them—is racial capitalism’s foundational violence in Americas, Australia, and elsewhere. Indigenous peoples face genocide, dispossession, and forced assimilation as obstacles to capital accumulation from land.

Patrick Wolfe argues settler colonialism is “structure not event”—ongoing rather than historical. Indigenous peoples continue facing dispossession through resource extraction, environmental destruction, and attacks on sovereignty. The Land Back movement demands returning stolen Indigenous land and challenging settler colonial racial capitalism.

Disability Justice

Racial capitalism produces disability through: environmental racism causing illness, dangerous work conditions injuring workers, stress and poverty damaging health, lack of healthcare, and violence. Yet capitalism devalues disabled people as “unproductive” while extracting value through Medicaid-funded disability services and benefits programs enriching corporations.

Historically, eugenics targeted disabled people alongside racialized communities, often conflating the two—claiming Black people were inherently disabled/deficient. Contemporary incarceration disproportionately imprisons disabled people of color. Disability justice recognizes these intersections, challenging both ableism and racism.

Political Implications

Beyond Class Reductionism

Racial capitalism framework rejects class reductionism—treating class as primary contradiction and racism as secondary. Race and class are mutually constitutive; neither is reducible to the other. Effective anti-capitalist politics must be anti-racist; effective anti-racist politics must be anti-capitalist.

This challenges orthodox Marxist prioritizing class struggle over “identity politics.” From racial capitalism perspective, there’s no pure class struggle abstracted from race. Organizing “the working class” while ignoring racial divisions reproduces white working-class organizing that historically excluded workers of color.

Abolitionist Politics

Racial capitalism framework aligns with abolitionism—seeking to dismantle rather than reform institutions like police, prisons, and ICE. Reform assumes these institutions can serve justice; abolition recognizes they fundamentally exist to maintain racial capitalism through violence.

Police emerged from slave patrols and colonial militias—their purpose was always controlling racialized populations to enable exploitation. Mass incarceration continues slavery’s logic under different form. Reform—body cameras, implicit bias training, Black police chiefs—can’t transform institutions designed for racial violence. Abolition and building alternative community safety systems is necessary.

Reparations

Reparations for slavery and colonialism address racial capitalism’s ongoing legacies. Wealth gap between white and Black Americans results from centuries of unpaid enslaved labor, Jim Crow exclusion, discriminatory policy, and ongoing exploitation. Reparations would transfer wealth generated through racial capitalism to its victims and descendants.

Opposition to reparations often claims racism is historical, but racial capitalism framework shows it’s structural and ongoing. Contemporary wealth inequality directly results from racial capitalism’s historical operations. Reparations are partial justice, though full justice requires dismantling racial capitalism itself.

Decolonization and Global Justice

Racial capitalism’s global form requires decolonial politics: debt cancellation for Global South (debt is extraction mechanism), technology transfer, climate reparations, and democratization of international institutions (World Bank, IMF, WTO) that enforce neocolonial extraction.

Effective climate politics must be decolonial, recognizing Global North owes “climate debt” to Global South. Degrowth in North, development in South, reparations for climate damages, and transformed global economic relations that don’t extract from racialized South to enrich white North.

Coalition and Solidarity

Racial capitalism framework suggests coalition politics across racialized communities, recognizing different but interconnected struggles. Black, Indigenous, Latino, Asian, and Arab communities face different forms of racialization but share interest in dismantling racial capitalism.

This requires genuine solidarity—not subordinating one struggle to another but recognizing how they interconnect. Labor organizing must center workers of color’s specific experiences; anti-racist movements must address economic exploitation; feminist politics must be anti-racist and anti-capitalist.

Further Reading

Foundational Texts

• Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 1983. University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
• Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. 1944. University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
• Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. 1935. Free Press, 1998.
• Cox, Oliver Cromwell. Caste, Class, and Race. 1948. Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Contemporary Analysis

• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.
• Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
• Leong, Nancy. “Racial Capitalism.” Harvard Law Review 126.8 (2013): 2151-2226.
• Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Colonialism and Slavery

• Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 1972. Verso, 2018.
• Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Knopf, 2014.
• Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014.
• Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press, 2013.

Mass Incarceration

• Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2010.
• Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? Seven Stories Press, 2003.
• Wacquant, Loïc. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Duke University Press, 2009.
• James, Joy, ed. The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings. SUNY Press, 2005.

Contemporary Political Economy

• Fraser, Nancy, and Rahel Jaeggi. Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory. Polity, 2018.
• Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2002.
• Pulido, Laura. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II: Environmental Racism, Racial Capitalism and State-Sanctioned Violence.” Progress in Human Geography 41.4 (2017): 524-533.
• Bhattacharyya, Gargi. Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

Intersectional Analysis

• Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, & Class. Random House, 1981.
• Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-1299.
• Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106.8 (1993): 1707-1791.
• Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

See Also

• Capitalism
• Slavery
• Colonialism
• Mass Incarceration
• Environmental Racism
• Intersectionality
• Primitive Accumulation
• Social Death
• Necropolitics
• Abolition
• Reparations
• Settler Colonialism
• Imperialism