Addressing Systemic Racial Injustice in the United States from the War on Poverty to Social Enterprise to Black Lives Matter (original) (raw)
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RACIAL CAPITALISM AND BLACK SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change, 2022
This chapter offers insight on how existing paradigms within Black Studies, specifically the ideas of racial capitalism and the Black Radical Tradition, can advance sociological scholarship toward greater understanding of the macro-level factors that shape Black mobilizations. In this chapter, I assess mainstream sociological research on the Civil Rights Movement and theoretical paradigms that emerged from its study, using racial capitalism as a lens to explain dynamics such as the political process of movement emergence, state-sponsored repression, and demobilization. The chapter then focuses on the reparatory justice movement as an example of how racial capitalism perpetuates wide disparities between Black and white people historically and contemporarily, and how reparations activists actively deploy the idea of racial capitalism to address inequities and transform society.
Neoliberalism and stories of racial redemption
Dialectical anthropology, 2008
Two contradicting ideas dominate political discussions of race in the United States. In the first, Americans of all political stripes glory in the idea that the country's race relations have improved, largely due to changes collectively labeled as 'the civil rights movement.' Yet when Americans move their gaze to broader issues-often presumed to be beyond ''race''-of economics, public education, and civic life, they embrace a second, and seemingly opposed narrative of decline. There, social scientists have wedded this image of social decay into ideas of neoliberalism, which they take to be the state's steady disinvestment in public goods like education, healthcare, affordable housing and transportation. Though the rise of civil rights and neoliberalism have overlapped historically, social scientists have shown determined reluctance to make any connection between the two; and further, few have been willing to see the two processes as interwoven and collaborating in the production of the contemporary political economic landscape. This essay argues that academic neoliberal discourse has unwittingly functioned to relieve civil rights institutions of any responsibility for current racial conditions in the US by taking critical attention away from how federal agencies and local politicians have implemented racial reforms. In the current scenario, neoliberalism is to blame for undermining or retrenching the nation's commitment to racial equality, and civil rights victories are the victim. Ethnographic and historical material on race relations in Fayetteville NC, USA, is presented to argue instead that the relationship between the two turns out to be much more complex.
Theories of Radical Political Economy is an Independent Research Project, designed by Professor Floyd W. Hayes III and myself, in order to further elucidate the similarities and complexities of capitalism and racism through the scope of Critical Race Theory and alternative economic theory. This paper is written as a more intense examination of my previous paper, “The Economics of Racial Discrimination: A Brief Overview of the System of Racist Economics in “Post-Racial” America”, to explicate further research and developed theories on poverty, marginality, and their impact on the topic of “race”. In our study, Professor Hayes and I have drawn from various authors in political theory and political economy in the hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of how these topics relate to the many forms of invidious discrimination that non-whites face in the United States and abroad. Using Neo-Marxian analysis, we have focused primarily on the different socioeconomic trends that non-whites have been locked in to
The Three Dialectics of Racial Capitalism: From South Africa to the U.S. and Back Again
Du Bois Review, 2023
The current popularity of "racial capitalism" in the American academy is typically attributed to the work of Cedric Robinson. But in this paper, we demonstrate that Robinson was riding a wave that began a decade before: in the South African movement against apartheid. We trace the intellectual history of the concept through two heydays, one peaking in the 1970s and 1980s and another emerging following the 2008 financial crisis. To make sense of racial capitalism during these two heydays, we argue, one must locate the concept in relation to three dialectics. First, racial capitalism traveled back and forth between periphery and center, emerging, for example, in both the context of anti-and post-colonial/apartheid struggles in southern Africa, and against the backdrop of the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements in the United States. A second dialectic is evident in the way the concept, while initially produced in the context of these fierce struggles, was quickly absorbed into academic discourse. And, in addition to periphery/center and activism/academia, we identify a third dialectic: between the term itself and the broader problematic in which it was (and remains) situated. Our analysis is attentive to the ways that theories acquire contextually specific meanings as they travel, providing a model for understanding the circulation across multiple political contexts of a concept as deceptively stable as racial capitalism. It also demonstrates how expansive the field of racial capitalism actually is, extending well beyond any particular historical or geographic context, institutional or social domain, and even the very term itself.
Race(ism) - the foundation of neoliberalism(s)
2019
In the first section I argue that changing race relations in the post-civil rights era formed the pretext for the American Turn to neoliberalism. Ranlophe Hohle’s (2015, 2017) work provides and important and unique analysis of the racial recoding of policy imperatives along a binary discourse of black-public white-private that facilitated the turn of white working and middle classes towards neoliberal policies, away from state welfare. From this analytical position, I argue that the black-public | white-private discourse of neoliberalism reveals how race(ism) serve(d)(s) as the primary means of galvanizing support from the electoral majority thus enabling liberal business elites to achieve state power.
"Racial Capitalism", 2019
"Racial capitalism" has surfaced during the past few decades in projects that highlight the production of difference in tandem with the production of capital-usually through violence. Scholars in this tradition typically draw their inspiration-and framework-from Cedric Robinson's influential 1983 text, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. This article uses the work of Orlando Patterson to highlight some limits of "racial capitalism" as a theoretical project. First, the "racial capitalism" literature rarely clarifies what scholars mean by "race" or "capitalism." Second, some scholars using this conceptual language treat black subjectivity as a debilitated condition. An alleged byproduct of the Transatlantic slave trade, this debilitated form of black subjectivity derives from an African American exceptionalism that treats slavery as a form of abject status particular to capitalism without providing adequate theoretical justification or historical explanation. By contrast, we demonstrate how Patterson's insights about property, status, and capital offer an analysis of slavery more attentive to race, gender, sexuality, age, and ability. We close by using the "forensics of capital" to explore the notions of causality and protocols for determining who owes what to whom implicit in Patterson's concept of "social death."
Perspectives on Politics, 2018
At the last American Political Science Association annual meeting I attended, Charles Mills was on the lips of nearly everyone I saw speak. This is as it should be. His work on racial liberalism is key not only to understanding this political moment-a moment in which white nationalism has become more visible, virulent, and accepted-but also to opening eyes to the continuity of white supremacy in the United States. His critical engagements with ideal theory and the white episteme help us understand why whites' eyes in particular have been closed to the centrality of racial domination in US democracy, liberal theory and practice, and modernity itself. And his positive assessment of the possibilities of liberalism stands as an encouraging counterpoint to the views of racial pessimists and skeptics, while his ideas about reconstructing liberal theory in the direction of a black radical liberalism point a way forward. Black Rights/White Wrongs brings various threads of Mills' past arguments together, updating when appropriate and elaborating on them as necessary. At the heart of the book is the following claim: while there is now broad recognition of the poisonous effect of classism and sexism on liberal practice and theory, academics and the public continue to lag when it comes to seeing how racism has deeply infected liberalism. Why? White ignorance (see Ch. 4)-a powerful cognitive tendency to perceive and interpret the world in ways that filter out evidence of racial domination-perpetuates romantic ideas about liberal societies and theory. Such ignorance feeds and is fed by a variety of social dynamics and intellectual currents. Mills, particularly concerned with philosophy, highlights the mystification of central figures in the liberal tradition (like Kant-see Ch. 6) and the occlusion of racial domination by the privileging of certain philosophical approaches and methods (see his criticism of Rawls in Ch. 5 and Part 2). In both practice and theory, liberalism has been as deeply shaped by racism as it has been shaped by patriarchal capitalism. What we have in contemporary U.S. society, Mills argues, is 'racial liberalism': a regime that only recognizes the moral equality of, and thus only benefits, whites (see Chs. 1-3). This reality requires a