Racial capitalism

A history of the United States' systematic expulsion of "undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of the passengers who travelled from around the world, only to be locked up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains.

The United States, celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has developed the most extensive system of imprisonment and deportation that the world has ever known. The Deportation Express is the first history of American deportation trains: a network of prison railroad cars repurposed by the Immigration Bureau to link jails, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses across the country and allow forced removal with terrifying efficiency. With this book, historian Ethan Blue uncovers the origins of the deportation train and finds the roots of the current moment, as immigrant restriction and mass deportation once again play critical and troubling roles in contemporary politics and legislation.

A century ago, deportation trains made constant circuits around the nation, gathering so-called "undesirable aliens"—migrants disdained for their poverty, political radicalism, criminal conviction, or mental illness—and conveyed them to ports for exile overseas. Previous deportation procedures had been violent, expensive, and relatively ad hoc, but the railroad industrialized the expulsion of the undesirable. Trains provided a powerful technology to divide "citizens" from "aliens" and displace people in unprecedented numbers. Drawing on the lives of migrants and the agents who expelled them, The Deportation Express is history told from aboard a deportation train. By following the lives of selected individuals caught within the deportation regime, this book dramatically reveals how the forces of state exclusion accompanied epic immigration in early twentieth-century America. These are the stories of people who traveled from around the globe, only to be locked up and cast out, deported through systems that bound the United States together, and in turn, pulled the world apart. Their journey would be followed by millions more in the years to come.

University of California Press, 2021

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520304444/the-deportation-express

A thorough analysis of capital punishment from a political-geographical perspective is lacking in the discipline of geography. This is despite the fact that capital punishment overlaps with numerous geographic approaches, concepts, and areas of study. This study serves as a call to geographers to begin considering capital punishment's wide interaction and interrelation with developed areas of knowledge in the discipline. Specifically, political geographers stand to contribute in novel ways to wider discussions about capital punishment by analyzing executions relative to contemporary work in geography on violent, legal, and carceral spaces. I first introduce the need for geography's engagement with this pressing issue. Then, I clarify several terms needed to understand this violent practice. A third section highlights several pathways of development in the critical geographies of capital punishment. It is organized around four broad themes-critically mapping capital punishment, bodies in motion, politics of access, and executing the "other"-connecting capital punishment to developing concepts, literatures, and sub-disciplines in geography. The final two sections outline an epistemological approach to the geographies of capital punishment and how legal and carceral geographies might contribute.

The fire-ravaged skylines engulfing U.S. cities in the 1960s have left such an enduring mark on the nation’s historical imagination that they have obscured the far more destructive and protracted wave of landlord arson in the 1970s. Although the latter fires were lit not for protest, but for profit by way of insurance payouts, it was the state and corporate reaction to the 1960s uprisings that served as their kindling. Bench Ansfield asks how urban neighborhoods of color, long redlined by property insurers, came to be underwritten by public-private insurance pools introduced by an offshoot of the Kerner Commission in 1968. Despite being branded as a racial justice measure, this insurance initiative benefited nobody more than absentee landlords, setting the stage for further ruin.
https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/107/4/899/6157212?login=true

Huey P. Newton remains one the left’s intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton’s thought by shedding light on his theory of empire, and the present-day value of returning to his thought. The article centres on how Newton’s critique of what he called ‘reactionary intercommunalism’ prefigures many of the elements found in the work of Hardt and Negri on empire. This comparison will be used to show how Newton not only foresaw elements of the rise of contemporary neoliberal globalization, but also offered an idea of political solidarity and revolutionary politics for such a context. The article concludes by highlighting how Newton’s ideas about the need for a war of position based on ‘survival pending revolution’ presents a more theoretically and empirically salient conceptualization of resistance than his successors.

Political Protest Graffiti is an increasingly visible form of rhetoric that provides a democratizing space to enable its disenfranchised peoples to articulate their own narratives. As a form of visual activism, the George Floyd Protest Graffiti acts to historically document the tragic sentiment of the collective protest demonstration and testify to political and racial struggles in America. In this essay, I examine the George Floyd Protest Graffiti as a discursive site to analyze how emotions come into play in its production. With a rhetorical power to communicate ideas and influence public debate, I contend that the Floyd cultural graffiti production functions as a system of socio-cultural negotiations and a political call to arms to collapse structural racism in America.

This article examines the legal and moral basis for migration as a form of reparation for the harms inflicted on the states and peoples of the Global South through climate change and through centuries of predatory economic policies. Using Central America migration to the United States as a case study, the article explains that susceptibility to climate change is a function of two variables: exposure and social and economic vulnerability.  High-emitting affluent states are disproportionately responsible for Central America’s exposure to climate change due to their historic and current greenhouse gas emissions, their unwillingness to curb these emissions, and their failure to provide adequate adaptation assistance.  The United States is responsible for Central America’s social and economic vulnerability due to its history of invasions, coups, military occupations, support for brutal dictatorships, and imposition of damaging economic policies.  Climate law scholars have proposed that high-emitting states accept climate-displaced persons into their territory in proportion to each country’s historic contribution to climate change. Migration law scholars have advocated for the admission of so-called “economic migrants” as a form of compensation for the North’s exploitation and domination of the South from the colonial era to the present. This article combines the insights of both group of scholars and argues for migration as a form of reparation for the environmental, social, and economic harms inflicted on the Global South that have undermined its resilience to climate change and have disrupted the lives and livelihoods of its inhabitants.  Re-conceptualizing migration as one form of reparation challenges traditional notions of bounded autonomous sovereign states by highlighting the political, ecological, and economic interconnectedness of states and peoples and by calling for policies that recognize this interdependence.

This article discusses the dispossession experienced by people of African descent during collaborations within Belgian institutions. I  show that identifying misunderstandings or dysfunctions is not sufficient to explain why people of African descent, whether activist or not, consider that institutions appropriate their knowledge and sometimes bodies as part of more or less remunerated labor for/within Belgian institutions. I address these collaborations  as  instruments  of  ‘temporary  inclusion’.  I  discuss  the  conditions under which the experience of dispossession that occurs through these devices can be addressed as an extraction politics.

This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultural chemicals have been encoded as agrarian best practices. I develop the concept of agrarian racial regimes, based on the work of Cedric Robinson, to examine how constructed hierarchies of human worth are made central to the sale and usage of chemicals. A focus on the politics of pesticides in the Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the U.S. South, elucidates the ways in which agrarian racial capitalism has been reproduced through shifting antiblack conceptions of racial difference and technological progress. Two key conjunctures serve to draw these dynamics into relief: the development of the application of pesticides by aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s and the shift toward nearly complete mechanization and chemicalization of cotton production in the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing film and advertisements in this period in the context of the material relations of agriculture and race, I argue that dispossession and toxicity are encoded as best practices through antiblack representations of agrarian whiteness. In the first period, chemicals were positioned as the height of progress through racist depictions of Black workers in the fields. In the second period, in response to Black challenges to white supremacy, the notion of “clean cotton” was deployed to represent Black absence as the height of technological progress and possessive agrarian masculinity. In both instances, racial representation has served to justify unstable and toxic relations of unequal power and profit.

This article explores the ways in which death can be understood to occupy a formative function in the construction of Irish national identity. The analysis of three distinct moments in Irish history (Plantation-era funerary practices, the Great Famine, and the 1981 hunger strikes) is undertaken with recourse to Michel Foucault’s understanding of race as it is deployed through disciplinary and biopower and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. The continuing concern with history in Irish political discourse is juxtaposed with Derrida’s idea of ‘hauntology’. It will be seen that the act of remembering politically carries with it an ambivalent legacy, exposing the violence at the heart of the establishment of both states in Ireland, while maintaining the potential of emancipatory promise. This promise is itself rooted in the violence implicated in the production of alterity through the historical experience of death.

This article, based on 16 months of in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted over five years, explores the participation of young Afro-Italian women entrepreneurs in new initiatives related to Black beauty, style, and (natural) hair care. While based primarily in northern Italy, these projects draw on economic and cultural connections to the broader Black diaspora. I argue that entrepreneurship has emerged as an important strategy for Afro-Italian women seeking to advance new narratives about Blackness (and specifically, Black womanhood) and its inclusion within the material and symbolic boundaries of Italy. At the same time, Afro-Italian entrepreneurship is transforming Italian material culture, and, by extension, the meanings of Italianness itself. Entrepreneurship is thus a key terrain of struggle through which Afro-Italians have begun to assert claims to Italian citizenship and belonging in the context of both economic stagnation and a refugee ‘emergency‘. It is one example of a nascent Black spatial politics in Italy that is conditioned by, but also pushes back against, dominant regimes of racist exclusion and neoliberal racial capitalism.

This essay argues that Asian American racialization has historically been attendant on the needs of capital. By examining the dystopic zombie novel Severance alongside a long history of Asian exclusion and racialized fears of contagion, this essay considers the convergence of Orientalism and capitalism at the site of the “fevered” zombie body. The essay ends by considering moments of narrative impasse or divergence from capitalist spacetimes to imagine an Asian American humanity that is not constrained by race and labor categories.

Past and present forms of internationalism have taught us that the struggle against racial capitalism and Imperialism can only succeed if undertaken as a collective. As rising temperatures and sea levels (as well as the rapid spread of the deadly coronavirus) remind us, international solidarity is neither an abstract nor intellectual duty. Rather, it derives from the realization that our own liberation — and indeed, our survival — is fundamentally linked to the liberation and survival of the most oppressed people across the globe.

When a U.S. resident is arrested by immigration authorities, significant financial losses immediately begin to accumulate to themselves and to their immediate family. Drawing on a survey of 125 households in Pima County, AZ, this paper examines the scope of these financial losses; the strategies that household members deploy to absorb and manage these losses; and their downstream repercussions for those activities and infrastructures associated with everyday and generational household social reproduction. Attention to these issues foregrounds the collective dimensions of harm-e.g., how the destabilizing effects of arrest, detention and/or deportation are never experienced by any individual in isolation, but rather multiply across those persons and relationships of dependency, care and support to whom these individuals remain connected over time. Given the disproportionate concentration of U.S. immigration policing on communities of Latin American origin, these outcomes carry important implications for the articulation of everyday conditions of labor, inequality and accumulation under racial capitalism. At the same time, people respond to the disruption of relationships of home and family through new practices, relationships and institutions of mutual aid, solidarity and struggle. What results is movement: novel patterns of collective life that transform the very communities whose members the state is attempting to violently separate. By exploring this latter dynamic, the paper contributes to emerging literatures on carceral and abolition geographies, connecting everyday conditions of social reproduction and the production and circulation of value to a broader dialectic of community resistance against state violence and material dispossession.

This essay introduces a special issue of ACME focused on the "carceral-police continuum." We use this phrase to highlight three important concepts in policing and carceral geographies scholarship. The first is the imminence of coercive state power, and its uneven distribution. The second is the tangled and expansive web of relationships through which carceral logics and practices operate. The third are the ways attention to these conditions can contribute a conceptual framework to abolitionist praxis. After first offering some additional commentary on each of the problem areas identified above, we then describe how each of the papers collected here advances our understanding of these issues. We conclude by identifying several directions for continuing development, including a need for ongoing conceptual and methodological innovation that supports efforts toward collective forms of organizing, mitigation and redress directed at various forms of state violence, carceral power and their repercussions.

“Potential worlds” offers a speculative proposition that is profoundly generative—helping us to defeat nihilism and despair—and as such it carries an explosive quality within it. For it implicitly recognizes the bankruptcy of the present world, the one most live in, an expansion- ist one-world world that tries to dominate all others, erasing all alter- natives. As a container for petrocapitalism’s climate catastrophe, beyond-grotesque economic inequality, endless war, surveillance capital, algorithmic oppression, and anti-democratic politics, that world is as grievable as it is condemnable. Not surprisingly, we are increasingly surrounded by end-of-world narratives within our global culture industry, which, pathetically, even as it continually represents the end-times in endless dystopian sci-fi iterations, fails repeatedly to imagine any polit- ical and economic order meaningfully different from the present one. What hopes and creative practices exist for cultivating and realizing an emancipatory imagination, a liberationist eco-fiction, for envisioning and building another world, another future?

The world’s languages are in crisis: intergenerational transmission of around half the world’s languages is collapsing. I argue that to understand and intervene in this situation, we need to radically reimagine what it means to call it a crisis. We need to think about this crisis not simply as an acute emergency (which it is), but also in Antonio Gramsci's sense of a period in which ‘the old is dying but the new cannot be born’. In this sense, our present moment of crisis is one in which language oppression and language revitalization co-exist in dynamic tension. To analyze this Gramscian crisis of linguistic justice at a world scale, I argue that we need to conceive of a world system constituted by the articulation of nationalism, colonialism, racism, and capitalism. My description of this system and how it produces language oppression aims to support scholars and activists to seize our current moment of crisis and make positive interventions in the global system towards a future of greater linguistic justice.

Ausgehend von dem Fall einer schwangeren Frau aus dem Lager Moria auf Lesbos, die wegen Brandstiftung angeklagt wurde, fragt dieser Artikel nach den Ursachen der strafrechtlichen Verfolgung von Refugees. Mit Friedrich Nietzsche und Saidiya Hartman wird die These vertreten, dass die rechtliche Subjektivierung rassifizierter Menschen vor allem dem "Anrecht auf Grausamkeit" seitens der hegemonialemn Rechtssubjekte genügen soll. Was bedeutet dies für das Recht als potentielles Medium emanzipatorischer Kämpfe?

Huey P. Newton remains one the left's intellectual enigmas. Although lauded for being the leader of the Black Panther Party, Newton is relatively unacknowledged as an intellectual. This article challenges the neglect of Newton's thought by shedding light on his theory of empire, and the present-day value of returning to his thought. The article centres on how Newton's critique of what he called 'reactionary inter-communalism' prefigures many of the elements found in the work of Hardt and Negri on empire. This comparison will be used to show how Newton not only foresaw elements of the rise of contemporary neoliberal globalization, but also offered an idea of political solidarity and revolutionary politics for such a context. The article concludes by highlighting how Newton's ideas about the need for a war of position based on 'survival pending revolution' presents a more theoretically and empirically salient conceptualization of resistance than his successors.

Ireland is one of the few countries to be discussed systematically in Capital, Karl Marx's most important work. Ireland and the Irish were also discussed in Marx's lesser known economic writings and journalism. And famously, Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England devoted a chapter to the status of Irish migrant labourers in Industrial Britain. This paper discusses Marx and Engels' writings on Ireland and how they relate to three other important themes in their work: race, gender, and the nature of "Primitive Accumulation".  As with their writings on Jews or Indians, Marx and Engels rehearsed a number of common contemporary racial stereotypes about Irish people, specifically focusing on their supposed primitiveness, backwardness or even drunkenness and lack of hygiene. At the same time, however, Marx and Engels also saw the Irish in idealised terms: a revolutionary and masculine people who existed outside of the space-time of capitalism. Marx and Engels engaged in romanticised visions of Ireland and, this paper argues, race and gender (concepts not usually considered central to Marxian thought)
played a strong role in that romance.

This article addresses a crucial dimension of urban development: the recruitment of minority artists in the gentrification of space. The argument is that the production and exploitation of racial difference have underwritten the creative economy’s spurious claims to inclusion and diversity. Difference thus underwrites ideologies of developmental growth, proving a means of extracting monetary value and consolidating political power. The argument is grounded in an analysis of Kara Walker’s recent works—A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014), an installation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Ruffneck Constructivist show (2014) in Philadelphia—and the debates they generated. A Subtlety thematized the gentrification of Williamsburg by putting it into relation with forms of humiliation associated with slavery. It also cast Walker, with some irony, as the scapegoat for related anxieties about complicity and success. The Ruffneck show, by contrast, imagined the decimated spaces of the midcentury welfare state to comprise an alternative ground for conceiving the racial origins of progress and thus for evaluating the epistemologies of contemporary liberalism. The article concludes with a discussion of social practice as it pertains to race in cities, situating Walker as a unique figure in this movement for having produced works that aggravate, rather than empower, her audience. Walker’s achievement has revealed the extent to which the debasement of others remains a central component of cultural production and liberal identification, today as in the past.

Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA) – the production of food in cities – argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio-temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, I propose that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA's contradictory motivations and outcomes. As an analytical framework, racial capitalism considers how distinct forms of colonization, settler colonialism, and white supremacy function relationally as part of a unified system of capitalist accumulation built on the exploitation of racialized human and spatial difference. By focusing on, UA's contributions to racial Othering, the racialization of space, and dispossession, on the one hand, and on struggles of resistance and self-determination, on the other, this review attempts to sheds new light on the dialectical, " both/and " nature of UA, while also addressing recent calls to consider how settler colonial logics persist in the contemporary North American city.

In this Article, I consider the contemporary law reform project of a radical social movement seeking to transform the state: specifically, the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice.” The Movement for Black Lives is the leading example of a contemporary racial justice movement with an intersectional politics including feminist and anti-capitalist commitments. The visions of such radical social movements offer an alternative epistemology for understanding and addressing structural inequality and injustice. By studying not only the critiques offered by radical social movements, but also their visions for transformative change, the edges of law scholarship can be expanded, a deeper set of critiques and a longer set of histories—of colonialism and settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and mass incarceration—centered, and a bolder project of transformation forwarded. These visions should push legal scholars toward a broader frame for understanding how law, the market, and the state co-produce intersectional structural inequality, and toward agendas that focus not on building the power of law and law enforcement, but on transforming the state and society and building the power of marginalized communities. This shift would invigorate the social movements literature and bring new energy to scholarship on substantive areas of law, from criminal and immigration law to property and contract law.

To illustrate the creative potential of studying radical social movements, this Article considers policing the Vision for Black Lives with the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Ferguson and Baltimore reports. The Vision and DOJ reports offer alternate conceptualizations of the problem of policing and the appropriate approach to law reform. Reflective of liberal law reform projects on police, the DOJ reports identify policing as a fundamental tool of law and order that serves the collective interests of society, and locate the problems of police in their failure to adhere to constitutional law. As a remedy, the DOJ reports advocate for investing more resources in police: more trainings, better supervision, community policing. In contrast, the Vision identifies policing as a historical and violent force in Black communities underpinning a system of racial capitalism and limiting the possibilities of Black life. Here, law is central to the shape and legitimation of racialized violence and inequality. The Vision’s reimagination of policing—rooted in Black history and Black intellectual traditions—transforms mainstream approaches to reform. The Vision demands shrinking the large footprint of policing, surveillance, and incarceration, and shifting resources into other social programs in Black communities: housing, health care, jobs, and schools. It focuses on building power in Black communities, and fundamentally transforming the relationship between government, market, and society. In forwarding an abolitionist imagination, the movement offers transformative, affirmative visions for change designed to address the structures of inequality—something legal scholarship has for far too long lacked.

This article considers how racial capitalism can be productively mobilized to extend contemporary work on settler colonial urbanism. It argues that scholars interested in the latter have much to gain from the recent flourishing of geographical work on the former. Our contribution begins by surveying some of the core tensions and affinities between the theoretical commitments that animate the settler colonial and racial capitalism frameworks. It then examines the historical development of Winnipeg, Manitoba in an effort to ground our thinking in an empirical context. In doing so, it surveys the key dimensions of that city's settler colonial urban history, focusing on the ways that property relations have functioned as a technique of racial domination. It concludes with a consideration of how an engagement with racial capitalism offers important opportunities to develop a more expansive understanding of racialized oppression in this and other contexts.

American philosopher-public intellectual Prof Cornel West comes together with leading Indian scholar Dr Suraj Yengde to discuss race, caste and politics -- questions inflamed in the light of the George Floyd protests in the US, and recurrent incidents of oppression in India.

How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude traces how agrarian engineers, indigenous farmers, mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from mestizo elites and, where that fails, through acts of labor militancy. Against institutional faith in property ownership as a means to detach land and people, present and past, the kin of former masters and servants alike have insisted that ethical debts from earlier racial violence stretch across epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the region’s agrarian past. By tracing Ayopayans’ active efforts to contend with servitude’s long shadow, Mareike Winchell demonstrates existing alternatives to property both as an extractive paradigm and a technique of historical redress.
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520386440/after-servitude

Anti-colonialism is a scam today.
It is the ideological abode of new forms of capital accumulation, symbolised by the Capitalist International of the Postcolonial Immigrant and Silicon Valley.
Anti-colonialism propels the intensification of the 'social death' of black people.

In 2015 the British government finally finished paying off the Slavery Abolition Act loan. For 180 years it had serviced debt created by the massive public borrowing of 1835, which was used to compensate British slave owners for the loss of their “slave property” during emancipation. This article interrogates this 180-year-long debt legacy and argues for the need to recast our understanding of emancipation processes within the frame of racial capitalism. The article specifically considers the financial dimension of emancipation as constituting an apparatus of what is termed necrospeculation.  The accounting procedures of British slave emancipation appropriated financial value not just from living enslaved bodies but also from dead and absent ones. The British state oversaw and directed an intergenerational regime that plundered wealth from enslaved black communities and their descendants to enrich the accounts of Britain’s racial capitalist imperial order. The study concludes with a reading of Maxwell Philip’s 1854 novel Emmanuel Appadocca as a reflection on the potentials of black redress and black critique from within the necrospeculative order of colonial postslavery. The author argues that “postslavery” is in fact not a past historical period but a critical designation of the social and relational terms of our present.

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of antisemitism and Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.