Introduction: Special Issue on Racial Capitalism and Law (original) (raw)

Racial capitalism is a conceptual framework that illuminates the relationship between race and class in the global economy. Formulated initially by South African scholars and activists, the concept of racial capitalism was further developed by US political theorist Cedric Robinson ([1983] 2000), building on the Black Radical tradition, including the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Oliver Cromwell Cox, and Eric Williams. The concept of racial capitalism has spawned a vast interdisciplinary literature, reflecting multiple theoretical perspectives on the various ways that race and class (along with gender, disability, and other markers of identity) are structurally imbricated and consign humans to different roles in the capitalist world economy in order to generate wealth and profit for a transnational capitalist class dominated by Euro-descendent elites. Drawing on the work of Robinson, among many others, we define racial capitalism as a global system of racialized extraction in which race-making operates as a means of stratifying populations for the purpose of facilitating profit-making. Based on the work of Omi and Winant (2015), among others, we define racism as a technology of governance that naturalizes socially constructed hierarchies and treats them as the inevitable outgrowth of human physical and cultural differences rather than the product of coercive and extractive practices and ideologies.