Sacred Headwaters #16: Racial Capitalism
Is racism a foundational component of capitalism?
Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and read through the other issues when you can. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:
Issue #16: Racial Capitalism
In the last issue, we read about how anti-racism activists over the last century have identified deep connections between structural issues — legal, political, cultural — and racism and posed the question, “Why haven’t things gotten better?”
It’s an interesting question that, if you’ve been reading along, you know I apply equally to climate change: we have “solutions.” We know how to implement them. We know exactly what the problems are and have for 40 years. The same can be said for racism and systemic racism: it’s been a problem in North America for 400 years, but even on a shorter timescale, we see the same problems today that we saw in the 1960s, despite a whitewashing of the “success” of the Civil Rights Movement. Some details have improved but others have worsened by orders of magnitude (i.e. the expansion of the carceral state) making it hard to claim that there has been real improvement in total.
The question quickly becomes, “Why can’t we solve these problems?” Have we just not yet identified the right leverage points to achieve systems change? Or, is racism — and by a similar token, extractivism — a foundational component of capitalism, one that can’t be teased apart from the ideology of accumulation?
We’ve seen tremendous economic growth globally over the last 200 years. But where did that growth come from, really? Was it a product of human ingenuity and technological innovation? Or a capture of value by the white Western world through a process of racialized dispossession, beginning with global imperialism, moving through American slavery, and culminating in the ongoing fossil fuel and resource extraction of the 20th and 21st centuries?
Many people today see racism as, in essence, an imperfection of the current capitalist system: racist attitudes are a holdover from a past age, something we can overcome through sophistication. But some of the authors we’ll read today see things differently: racism isn’t a failure of the market or a long-standing tradition of bigotry that must be stamped out. It’s a precondition of market capitalism. Similar arguments were made by Karl Marx in the 19th century; he wrote extensively about slavery in the US and believed it was a key driver of global industrialization. But some go even further, arguing that racism essentially came first, facilitating the emergence of capitalism through an existing framework of dehumanization.
“Racial Capitalism” (20 minutes)
This piece looks at the concept of “racial capitalism” (introduced by name in 1983 in Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism) through a modern lens and within the context of global neoliberalism. The fundamental argument behind the logic of racial capitalism is that capital can only accumulate by means of inequality between humans and that inequality can only be viewed as acceptable through racism. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore said, “Capitalism requires inequality. Racism enshrines it.” This essay delves into the cultural aspects of capitalism: the author argues that inherent in the “free market” ideology is the construction of a narrative that justifies differential opportunity. This includes racism, but it also includes the classic American story of “hard work:” if you’re poor, it’s because you don’t work hard enough. The culpability for inequality is attributed to those who are worst off rather than to social organization as a whole, allowing the accumulation of capital by the wealthy to continue with moral license. It also looks at how capitalism affects relationships: the author (and, by citation, Ruth Gilmore) calls racial capitalism a “technology of antirelationality” — it’s a structure of social organization that dismantles traditional relationships, creating division amongst the dispossessed while paradoxically building a framework of new relationships (consumer, employer, etc.) that facilitate accumulation of capital. It ends on an interesting note: up to 50% of remaining natural resources in the world are on land that is traditionally occupied or stewarded by Indigenous peoples. The author finds that North American Indigenous ways of knowing — something I wrote about in issue #9 — represent a framework for life that is almost anathema to racial capitalism, a framework of relationality that involves living within a network of all things and across time and space. She suggests that perhaps lessons from Indigenous frameworks can be an antidote to the on-going racialization of capitalism, something I’ve also suggested in past issues.
Selections from Black Reconstruction (60 minutes)
The link includes chapters 1, 2, and 17 of this book. 1 and 2 are relevant to our discussion, 17 goes a bit out of scope but is worth a read nonetheless.
If all labor, black as well as white, became free — were given schools and the right to vote—what control could or should be set to the power and action of these laborers? Was the rule of the mass of Americans to be unlimited, and the right to rule extended to all men regardless of race and color, or if not, what power of dictatorship and control; and how would property and privilege be protected? This was the great and primary question which was in the minds of the men who wrote the Constitution of the United States and continued in the minds of thinkers down through the slavery controversy.
This book, written by W. E. B. Du Bois, was published in 1935 and looks at the post-Civil War era in the US. In these first two chapters, Du Bois lays out a story of labor and capital, framing capitalism in America as a “racial capitalism” fifty years before the term was formalized. Read in the context of the prior reading, it’s clear that Du Bois was making the same series of arguments that today’s theorists are making. Global industrial development (not just in the US) was fuelled by the rapid expansion of cotton production in the American South, an expansion that was in turn fuelled by the dispossession of value from slaves. Racism was increasingly codified and reinforced by economic necessity as the “Cotton Kingdom” grew. Narratives about the inability of Black slaves to care from themselves and their racial inferiority developed over time, as did legal disenfranchisement of freed Black men (who could vote in many Southern states well into the 19th century). These narratives and legal barriers were constructed to protect economic interests by creating and entrenching the divisions that facilitated accumulation of capital by the wealthy.
Du Bois also looks at the use of race to divide what he thinks would otherwise have been an impossibly powerful labor movement: the collaboration between Black slaves (and abolitionists) and white labor activists. Many of the white labor activists in the North found themselves in a position where they believed they had to support slavery in order to protect their own interests as laborers in a competitive market — a symptom of the “technology of antirelationality,” deconstructing the normal social relationships between humans in favor of the capital-generating competitive relationships between groups of laborers in a market. In some ways, Du Bois suggests that the existence of Black slavery ultimately caused the reversion of the American democratic experiment to a caste-based oligarchy; in essence, that the racial division encouraged or facilitated capitalism rather than vice versa.
Chapter 17, the last chapter in the linked excerpt, is about the propaganda of American historians writing about the Reconstruction period. It’s fascinating, and particularly salient in today’s era when “truth” is such a slippery subject. One interesting and relevant takeaway for me was Du Bois’ argument that from 1866-1873, there was a relatively pervasive belief in equality between Black and white Americans, at least in the North, but that the economic crisis of 1873 immediately ended that, raising again the question: does capitalism require racism to “succeed?”
Other Resources
This is an incredibly dense topic with 150 years of discourse (or more). I’ve read a lot more than I’m including above because I’m trying to stay true to my “roughly one hour of reading” rule, but at the same time, I feel that we’re barely scratching the surface, so I’m going to include a handful of other links for further reading and listening here.
(Podcast) “RUTH WILSON GILMORE MAKES THE CASE FOR ABOLITION” — more focused on the present moment in the USA and police and prison abolition…but any conversation with Gilmore is a conversation about racial capitalism.
“Conceptualizing the Carceral Turn,” Noah De Lissovoy — De Lissovoy goes beyond the concept of racial capitalism, arguing that modern neoliberalism has gone even further. He makes familiar arguments about how the culture of neoliberalism blames society’s most vulnerable for their situation, building a moral structure of individualism and punishment that manifests in what he calls the “carceral turn” — the dramatic expansion of state violence over the last four decades (in a variety of forms, including the prison industrial complex). Highly recommend this piece.
In this context, neoliberalism is characterized by the aggressive pursuit of new markets, an effort to scale back or eliminate obstacles to the mobility of capital including protections for wages, and a reframing of economic stratification and polarization as the effect of individual choices and abilities. (De Lissovoy)
Neoliberal Apartheid, Andy Clarno, Introduction — this book looks at Palestine and South Africa after the end of apartheid. Scholars often point to the divergent paths of the Palestinean / Israeli conflict and the liberation of South Africa, but Clarno argues that post-apartheid South Africa has much in common with the settler colonialism of Palestine. (And South Africa’s “neoliberal apartheid” of inequality continues through the present day).
Book Recommendation: Golden Gulag, Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Golden Gulag returns to the more practical and modern questions we began to look at in Issue #14, but uses that lens — specifically, the rapid expansion of the prison industrial complex in California during the neoliberal era — to explore the concept of racial capitalism. Du Bois attributed the Civil War to a surplus of land, labor, and capital; Gilmore attributes the rapid expansion of the carceral state to the same issues. Gilmore’s research began as a local struggle to determine how her community could better navigate the criminal justice system, but she uncovered such general and systemic causes for the unyielding violence of the state that her work grew far beyond that. She paints a picture of a confluence of social, political, cultural, and economic factors that led to the rapid growth of the carceral state as a “solution” for social problems. Gilmore argues that the rapid prison expansion was a racial capitalist response to the economic and political crises of the 1970s, and that to improve things, we need to go far beyond just recognizing that mass incarceration is racist. We need to recognize that it is a tool of violation and dispossession (that affects people of all races) and come together to reconsider how we organize society.
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