Racial capitalism is a concept reframing the history of capitalism as grounded in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, typically from black people. It was described by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism’s socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism “can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups”, and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the “unequal differentiation of human value.”
Harvard University Professor Walter Johnson presents the 2024 Bernard Bailyn Lecture in North American History on the topic ‘On Racial Capitalism: The Logic of the Broken Plate’. Organised by La Trobe University’s Department of Archaeology and History, the public lecture was recorded online on 22 October 2024. This lecture is sure to be of interest to anyone interested in North American history and themes of racism, colonisation and the economic exploitation of minority groups in general.
Professor Johnson grew up in Columbia, Missouri and has written extensively about racism and slavery in North America. His autobiographical essay, ‘Guns in the Family’ was included the 2019 edition of Best American Essays. It was originally published in the Boston Review, of which he is a contributing editor. Johnson’s 2003 article ‘On Agency’ is the most cited article in the history of the Journal of Social History and was recently the subject of a special issue of the journal in commemoration of its 20th anniversary.
Johnson’s work (from Wikipedia) focuses on the history of slavery, capitalism, white supremacy, Black resistance, and US imperialism. Johnson’s Soul by Soul draws upon the records of the Louisiana Supreme Court, the nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, slaveholders’ personal records, and the economic documentation produced by the trade itself. He developed his book over years, beginning with ideas he explored first in a seminar on Southern History taught by Nell Irvin Painter. He enlarged that through research and made it the topic of his 1995 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation. Economic historians have been critical of works in “the New History of Capitalism” such as Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams, claiming errors in economic arguments found in these books undercut their conclusions.
Featured Image: Dr Neville Buch in the Sinclair Lewis Collection, Port Washington Library, New York State, USA, 10 February 2023.
Neville Buch
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