Three Tensions in the Theory of Racial Capitalism

Abstract

In this essay the author assesses the relevance of scholarship on racial capitalism for sociological theory. The author highlights three tensions within the existing literature: (1) whether “race” as opposed to other forms of difference is the primary mode of differentiation in capitalism, (2) whether deficiencies in existing theory warrant the new concept “racial capitalism,” and (3) whether the connection between race and capitalism is a contingent or logical necessity. Existing discussions of racial capitalism implicitly or explicitly raise these tensions, but they do not adequately resolve them. Nonetheless, they remain important for generating further theory and research.

Provincialising American Capitalism: From Universal Instance to Contingent Case

“…6 Invoking "racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional particularities" (2000 [1983]:10) with little conceptual differentiation, Robinson often seemed to mobilise race simply as a shorthand for social difference; such as when referring to the "barbarians" of Greco-Roman imagination as being constituted by "diverse races with widely differing cultures" (2000 [1983]:10) or to the "multiracial" nature of the pre-modern Islamic world (2000 [1983]:88) without elaborating on why either of these should be understood in specifically racial-as opposed to ethnic or tribal-terms. On this ambiguity, see Go (2020). 7 Among many examples, Quijano (2000) contends that it was first in the Americas that diverse ethno-cultural identities were subsumed under overarching "racial" categories while Fields (1990) traces the origins of modern conceptions of race to the stark discrepancy between ideals of freedom and the fact of Black enslavement in the American colonies.…”

Race and the politics of exclusion: The socio‐historical contexts of Black brutality and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement

“…According to Issar (2020), BLM grounds its structural analysis of Black oppression on the concept of racial capitalism. Cedric Robinson is credited for conceptualizing this framework in his notable publication, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, first published in 1983 (Burden-Stelley, 2020;Go, 2020;Issar, 2020). Racial capitalism captures how racialized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually cumulative (Robinson, 1983), suggesting that exploitation of racialized minorities is necessary to maintain capitalist structures.…”

“…This historical domination of Blacks as expendable commodities continues to intensify their subjugation in society. This modern-day subjugation manifests in varying life conditions to include police violence, multiple disease risk factors, restricted access to resources in terms of affordable and appropriate housing, discrimination in employment and the judicial system, inequity and inequality in education systems, and gender inequality, among others (Burden-Stelley, 2020;Go, 2020;Issar, 2020;Pirtle, 2020;Robinson, 1983). A recent example of racial disparities is in the double pandemic of racism most evident in the demise of Black men and women by police brutality and the Coronavirus pandemic that has a disproportionately negative impact on Black and Brown people in the United States.…”

Not a token! A discussion on racial capitalism and its impact on academic librarians and libraries

“…Some scholars have examined the meanings behind race and capitalism by revisiting Marxism (Melamed, 2015), or explored the impact of capitalism on the process of racialization (Bhattacharyya, 2018). A critique of the theory on racial capitalism identified that both race and capitalism are not clearly defined among various critical race scholars and critical legal scholars and thus pose challenges in logic (Go, 2021), and the deficit narrative of Black communities in treating racialized people as the dominated (Ralph and Singhal, 2019).…”