Racial capitalism
[4][5][6] Furthermore, Black radicals in American sociology such as Du Bois, St. Claire Drake, Horace Cayton, and Oliver Cromwell Cox established a foundation for academic research on the intersection of racism and capitalism.
[4][7][8] In modern academic literature, racial capitalism has been discussed in the context of social inequities, ranging from environmental justice issues,[9][10][11][12] through the South African apartheid and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,[13] to disparities in COVID-19 pandemic contraction rates.
"[16] Building upon earlier examinations of racial discrimination in and inherent to various political ideologies and societal structures, Robinson challenged the Marxist notion of capitalism's negation of the basic discriminatory tenets of European feudalism, namely, its rigid caste system and reliance upon multi-generational serfdom.
[21] Beginning in the early modern period and reaching its apogee during the New Imperialism era, "racism formed an indispensable weapon in the armoury of the state elites, used to contain the class struggles waged by subaltern populations with a view to making the system safe for capital accumulation.
"[22] European colonialism was in large part driven by the gradual collapse of feudalism, the decline of which was hastened by events such as the Black Death, famines, and wars in as early as the 14th century.
Such decline created a crisis of capital accumulation, which resulted in class struggles undermining the feudal system, and many elites gradually looked to colonization as a way to maintain their wealth and power.
[24] The transatlantic voyages of Northern European explorers to the New World, unlike the conquests of Spanish colonizers, which yielded significant deposits of gold, silver, and other valuable metals, was subsidized primarily through agricultural plantations.
[25] Indentured servants in the Americas, mostly indebted or imprisoned Europeans, worked under a plantation owner for a set period of time, usually for four to seven years, before they obtained the status of a 'free man'.
As plantations grew in number, workloads surged, and indentured servitude terms expired, white American colonists searched for more sustainable means of economical, unrestricted employment to meet growing demand and ever-increasing profit quotas.
[6] In the aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, during which a multiracial coalition of European indentured servants and African slaves joined forces in an ultimately unsuccessful revolt against Virginian governor Sir William Berkeley, racial stratification emerged to prevent future mixed-raced alliances in the colony.
By privileging European servants and stipulating that all African slaves brought into Virginia were considered chattel, the colonial authorities created a system to separate out different races within the laboring population, using color as a sorting mechanism.
[28] Under the yoke of chattel slavery, and subject to its brutal practices, slaves, and by extension men and women of color more broadly were dehumanized, i.e. reduced to subhuman status.
[32] Burden-Stelly describes Anti-Blackness as reducing Blackness to "a category of abjection and subjection" through means such as claims of "absolute biological or cultural difference, ruling-class monopolization of political power, negative and derogatory mass media propaganda, [and] the ascent of discriminatory legislation..."[32] She defines anti-radicalism as the "repression and condemnation of anticapitalist and/or left-leaning ideas, politics, practices, and modes of organizing that are construed as subversive, seditious, and otherwise threatening to capitalist society.
'"[32] In the context of the First Red Scare, Burden-Stelly notes that a 1919 US Justice Department report named Radicalism and Sedition Among the Negroes, As Reflected in Their Publications condemned Blacks' "'ill-governed reaction toward race rioting,' 'threat of retaliatory measures in connection with lynching,' open demand for social equality, identification with the Industrial Workers of the World, and 'outspoken advocacy of the Bolshevik or Soviet doctrine.
Whitney Laster Pirtle, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Merced,[37] argues in her article that the social conditions developed by racial capitalism: (a) shape multiple diseases that interact with COVID-19 to influence poor health outcomes; (b) affect disease outcomes through increasing multiple risk factors for poor, people of color, including racial residential segregation, homelessness, and medical bias; (c) shape access to flexible resources, such as medical knowledge and freedom, which can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease; and (d) replicate historical patterns of inequities within pandemics, despite newer intervening mechanisms thought to ameliorate health consequences.
[14]A key case study Pirtle uses to illustrate the role of racial capitalism in COVID-19 health disparities is the overrepresentation in mortality among Black Americans in Detroit, Michigan.
