An ethnography of Chinese capitalist projects in Johannesburg that traces everyday relations of power and difference between ordinary Chinese migrant entrepreneurs, southern African workers, and South African communities at a Chinese wholesale mall along Johannesburg's old gold mining belt.

The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism—since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades. Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.

How has capitalism created or enhanced racism? In what ways do the violent histories of slavery and empire continue to influence the allocation of global resources? Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival proposes a return to analyses of racial capitalism – the capitalism that is inextricably linked with histories of racist expropriation – and argues that it is only by tracking the interconnections between changing modes of capitalism and racism that we can hope to address the most urgent challenges of social injustice. It considers the continuing impact of global histories of racist expropriation on more recent articulations of capitalism, with a particular focus on the practices of racial capitalism, the continuing impact of uneven development, territory and border-marking, the place of reproductive labour in sustaining racial capitalism, the marketing of diversity as a consumer pleasure and the creation of supposedly 'surplus' populations.

Race Capitalism Justice urges us to embrace a vision of justice attentive to the history of slavery not through the lens of human rights, but instead through an honest accounting of how slavery was the foundation of capitalism, a legacy that continues to afflict people of color and the poor. Inspired by Cedric J. Robinson's work on racial capitalism, as well as Black Lives Matter and its forebears including the black radical tradition, the Black Panthers, South African anti-apartheid struggles, and organized labor, contributors to this volume offer a critical handbook to racial justice in the age of Trump.

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America dispenses impeccably comprehensive research to expose the realities of African American poverty, health, employment, and education, as well as other demographics. Marable's conclusions prove an undeniable connection between the oppression and exploitation of Black America and capitalism.

Knowledge-making in the field of alternative economies has limited the inclusion of Black and racialized people's experience. In Beyond Racial Capitalism the goal is close that gap in development through a detailed analysis of cases in about a dozen countries where Black people live and turn to co-operatives to manage systemic exclusion. Most cases focus on how people use group methodology for social finance. However, financing is not the sole objective for many of the Black people who engage in collective business forms; it is about the collective and the making of a Black social economy. Systemic racism and anti-Black exclusion create an environment where pooling resources, in kind and money, becomes a way to cope and to resist an oppressive system. This book examines co-operatives in the context of racial capitalism-a concept of political scientist Cedric J. Robinson's that has meaning for the African diaspora who must navigate, often secretly and in groups, the landmines in business and society. Understanding business exclusion in the various cases enables appreciation of the civic contributions carried out by excluded racial minorities. These social innovations by Black people living outside of Africa who build co-operative economies go largely unnoticed. If they are noted, they are demoted to an “informal” activity and rationalized as having limited potential to bring about social change. The sheer determination of Black diaspora people to organize and build co-operatives that are explicitly anti-racist and rooted in mutual aid and the collective is an important lesson in making business ethical and inclusive.

A stinging critique of the link between global capitalism and U.S. multiculturalisms

We live in a starkly racialized economy: an economy whose history includes the Atlantic slave trade, enslaved plantation labor, and Jim Crow. The economic relations and social practices that have emerged from that history constitute, as Charles Mills puts it, "a system that is run by whites for white benefit." The question guiding this set of papers is how to pursue a racially just economy in light of this history. In the first paper, "Reparations and the Racial Wealth Gap," I evaluate the argument that the closure of the racial wealth gap is owed as reparations for the injustices that created it. I argue that there are a number of problems with the argument; most importantly, it treats racial populations as separate corporate bodies, and in doing so obscures class differences within them. In the second paper, "Racial Exploitation and the Race-Class Nexus," I argue against Charles Mills's theory of racial exploitation. Mills argues that racial justice requires redistributing the proceeds from past racial exploitation and that racial exploitation can be distinguished from 'standard capitalist' exploitation. I argue that Mills's characterization of racial exploitation does not fit the most important historical cases, in part because Mills ignores processes of racial formation. So the concept of racial exploitation cannot provide the grounds for redistribution that Mills intends it to. Mills frames his project as a demand for a non-racial capitalism. In the third paper, "On the Idea of a Non-Racial Capitalism," I assess this broader goal. Many radical theorists and activists have argued that race and racism play critical roles in reproducing capitalist social relations and thus would argue that a non-racial capitalism is impossible. I argue that we do not need to make any general claims about capitalism and racism to see why this goal is confused; instead, we need to recognize how distant a non-racial capitalism is from our own. Getting to something that could be called a non-racial capitalism would require not merely a redistribution of wealth but a reconfiguration of global relations of production.

In this addition to the SAGE Series on Race and Ethnic Relations, Carter A. Wilson provides an interpretive history of racism, from antiquity to the present day.