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The relationship between blackness and the philosophy of history began with disavowal. Amos Beman, a black reverend from Connecticut, was determined to find information on the history of Africa and its people. In 1843, he wrote to Noah Webster, the famous editor and dictionary compiler, no doubt hoping that one of the nation’s most learned men could give him the answers he was searching for. Webster replied, “of the wooly-haired Africans . . . there is no history and can be none.”3 Although Webster would not have been aware of it, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had systematized this rejection of the possibility for African history in a series of lectures at the University of Berlin in the 1820s. Hegel concluded, “The Negro Black. . . exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state,” and that Africa “is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit.”4 For Hegel, history “shows the development of the consciousness of Freedom on the part of Spirit, and of the consequent realization of that Freedom.”5 This process unfolded across both time and space, beginning with what he described as despotism in the ancient Orient (freedom only for the despot), progressing through Greek and Roman antiquity (freedom for some), and culminating with the modern nations of Prussia and England (freedom for all). Hegel’s Negro, however, had “not yet attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence” and could have no awareness of the nature of freedom; he thus stood outside of history, “only as on the threshold.”6 Despite his ejection of blackness, Hegel’s philosophy of history remains foundational to commonsense understandings of how history works. In fact, his sense of the link between moral and historical progression has at times seemed to speak especially to black history—consider Martin Luther King, Jr.’s paraphrase of the abolitionist Theodore Parker, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”7 For Amos Beman and for many who came after, seeking out the archives of black history was not merely about correcting factual omissions or writing more complete narratives. The recovery of such histories would have moral force, providing crucial tools in the struggle for racial justice. These archives would write black history and, in doing so, write blackness into history, thus bringing black people closer to freedom. The collector and bibliophile Arthur Schomburg captured this sentiment when he wrote, in 1925, “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. . . . History must restore what slavery has taken away.”8 Recovering black history would be the bridge between the slave past and a freedom yet to come. Nearly a century after Schomburg wrote these words, there is a body of work on black history more magnificent than he probably could have imagined. Yet there is little doubt that this work has not—and cannot—restore what slavery took away. While figures such as Hegel and Webster attempted to cast Africa and Africans out of history, the production of countless black historical narratives has seemed to militate against their ultimate success. It has been the tireless work of two centuries to recover the archives of black history and reject this foundational exclusion, rendering Africans and their descendants fit for the long march through history and toward freedom.9 Following this logic, black people enter history precisely (perhaps only) at the moment that they confirm its forward movement by claiming a place within its trajectory. Black history begins when there is progress from slavery toward freedom— recall Schomburg’s rhetorical opposition, “history must restore what slavery has taken away.” Even though this type of historical progress seems to combat the violence of being excluded from history, it nonetheless confirms Hegel’s argument that history consists of the very movement toward freedom. Although many aspects of black history are illuminated by adhering to Hegel’s framework (King did, after all, successfully organize actual marches for freedom), others, such as Smith’s and Douglass’s hesitations about emancipation, are obscured and rendered illegible. And accounts of black history that boldly claim Africans’ and Africa’s historical importance remain contentious when they would trouble the story of history’s forward movement.10 Thus, it might be instructive to dwell on what it means to linger at the threshold, remaining on the edges of history (at least certain kinds of history). If what links King and Hegel is a faith that through the unfolding of history a freedom yet unrealized will be forthcoming, it is a faith that cannot account for the intractability of blackness. In other words, the perpetual movement closer to freedom, the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice—these models of history are not the only ways, or even the most useful ways, for making sense of slavery and its abolition. Reckoning with slavery and what came after requires new philosophies of history. Saidiya Hartman has used the term “afterlife of slavery” to describe the ways “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.”11 It is an apt formulation that suggests a different, counterintuitive relationship between past and present, slavery and freedom. To ponder slavery’s afterlife is to be open to the possibility that “the distinction between the past and the present founders on the interminable grief engendered by slavery and its aftermath . . . then and now coexist; we are coeval with the dead.”12 The notion of the afterlife is an interruption of progressive historical time. Things are supposed to live and then die, and if they live again or don’t quite die, it distorts any sense of proper sequence. That sense of distortion is productive. In the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “slavery here is a ghost, both the past and the living presence; and the problem of historical representation is how to represent the ghost.”13 Ian Baucom has argued that contemporary finance capitalism is a repetition or iteration of the financialized slave trade of the eighteenth century and that, by extension, “the present time . . . inherits its nonimmediate past by intensifying it.”14 Each of these philosophies of history is a reminder that history can move in a multitude of ways, whether cyclical, static, cumulative, palimpsestic, or something else entirely. It is important to emphasize that nothing inherent to black history is resistant to the movement toward freedom, and nothing inherent to blackness makes it coterminous with the unending violence of slavery. To insist otherwise would be to reinscribe Hegel’s beliefs about the historical stasis of Africa and the impossibility of black freedom. Rather, the historical formation of racial capitalism has bequeathed slavery an afterlife and rendered the forward movement of emancipation fraught. Racial capitalism places slavery within a broad, protean set of conditions that emerged out of but were not reliant upon slavery. These conditions continued to shape black freedom after emancipation. Racial capitalism’s adaptability—operating through the idiom of freedom as easily as it did through that of slavery—is what makes it so useful for theorizing a black philosophy of history. Using the language of racial capitalism to describe what came both before and after emancipation emphasizes historical continuities over breaks, without disavowing historical dynamism or making slavery itself the only determinant of black history. At times, the failures of emancipation were so great that black writers used the language of slavery even in its legal absence as a way of articulating a philosophy of history. Each emancipatory moment in the nineteenth-century British Atlantic world, whether in the U.S. North, the British West Indies, or the U.S. South, was premised on a form of freedom that transformed the primary vehicle for black subjugation from a relationship between capitalism and slavery into one between capitalism and freedom. Using an archive composed of black disappointment with freedom, the remainder of this chapter challenges the moral claims embedded within narratives about the progress from slavery to freedom and argues that racial capitalism ensured the transferability of systems of inequality beyond the slavery/freedom divide.15

In this report I argue that environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism. While the environmental justice movement has been a success on many levels, there is compelling evidence that it has not succeeded in actually improving the environments of vulnerable communities. One reason for this is because we are not conceptualizing the problem correctly. I build my argument by first emphasizing the centrality of the production of social difference in creating value. Second, I review how the devaluation of nonwhite bodies has been incorporated into economic processes and advocate for extending such frameworks to include pollution. And lastly, I turn to the state. If, in fact, environmental racism is constituent of racial capitalism, then this suggests that activists and researchers should view the state as a site of contestation, rather than as an ally or neutral force. I Introduction We need to rethink environmental racism. The environmental justice (EJ) movement arose in the early 1980s and over the last 35 years activists have succeeded at blocking both new projects and the expansion of existing ones. However, it is questionable if the environments of vulnerable communities have actually improved through EJ. There is compelling evidence that environmental disparities between white and nonwhite communities, what I call the environmental racism gap, have not diminished and that the situation may have worsened (Bullard et al., 2007). EJ scholars have hinted at why the movement has failed to achieve substantive results, including industry capture of the state (Faber, 2008; Lievanos, 2012; Holifield, 2007); state co-optation of EJ activists (Harrison, 2015); and a less oppositional EJ movement (Carter, 2014; Benford, 2005). Yet, I argue a fundamental problem characterizing both EJ activism and research is the failure to theorize environmental racism as a constituent element of racial capitalism. Numerous problems stem from not conceptualizing the problem accurately, including not giving sufficient weight to the ballast of past racial violence, and assuming the state to be a neutral force, when, in fact, it is actively sanctioning and/or producing racial violence in the form of death and degraded bodies and environments. My goal in this essay is to reposition environmental racism so that it is recognized as fundamental to contemporary racial capitalism. Although the environmental justice movement is global, I focus on the US. Besides originating in that country, it is in the US that EJ has most fully articulated a racial framework and relied heavily on the state. Hopefully other researchers will apply and modify this framework to other parts of the world as appropriate. Developing a more radical analysis of EJ places it in closer conversation with political ecology (Holifield, 2015; Heynen, 2015), the environmentalism of the poor (Nixon, 2011), and other radical streams emanating from the Global South. In addition, I hope to further acquaint geographers with research on racial capitalism coming from critical ethnic studies scholars, such as Jodi Melamed, Lisa Cacho, and John Marquez, as well as geography’s own Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Although I focus on environmental racism, I believe other parts of the social formation share structural parallels that might benefit from a similar analysis. In order to build my argument I first briefly demonstrate the limited gains of the EJ movement. I then consider how racial capitalism produces environmental racism by elaborating on three points. First, I emphasize the centrality of the production of social difference in creating value. Second, I review how the devaluation of nonwhite bodies has been incorporated into economic processes and advocate for extending such frameworks to include pollution. And lastly, I turn to the state. If environmental racism is indeed a function of racial capitalism, then the state immediately becomes problematic in new ways. This is crucial because in the US most activists and researchers are steeped in a liberal politics in which they work with the state. Instead, the state must become a site of opposition, as it sanctions racial violence. In order to move forward both as a movement and scholarly field, we must rethink environmental justice. II The environmental racism gap While nobody has compared the difference in environmental quality between white and nonwhite communities, numerous researchers have assessed the efficacy of state-based EJ initiatives. Key to understanding EJ efficacy is what I call the ‘environmental racism gap’. Recent scholarship has called attention to ‘environmental privilege’, which seeks to problematize the environmental quality enjoyed by more privileged populations (Park and Pellow, 2011). In contrast, the environmental racism gap highlights the persistent inequality between white and nonwhite communities. This gap, which is manifest in practices, regulations, and outcomes, requires discerning between universal and EJ regulations. Universal regulations seek to improve the environment across the board, such as the Clean Air Act. Despite neoliberal deregulation (Faber, 2008), there has been some progress over the last 40 years. For example, researchers have documented significantly increased lung function in youth as air pollution has declined (Gauderman et al., 2015). In contrast, EJ initiatives are intended to protect vulnerable populations and address the problem of differential exposure, especially concentrations (Noonan, 2015). This requires different tools, often called environmental justice. Below, I present some of the key avenues in which EJ activists have sought relief from the state (see Pulido et al., 2016, for a fuller discussion). Studies typically are narrowly focused in order to produce a rigorous and detailed analysis. Though such an approach is the norm and entirely appropriate, seen individually it obscures larger patterns. Seen collectively, however, it is difficult to escape the conclusion of failure. The first arena in which activists have appealed to the state is through lawsuits. To date, eight EJ lawsuits have been filed based on the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment to the US Constitution. All have failed. The primary problem is the inability to prove discriminatory intent – a requirement of a 2001 Supreme Court decision (Alexander v Sandoval), which contracted the definition of discrimination. A second register is Title VI Complaints. Under the Civil Rights Act, public agencies receiving federal funds are prohibited from discriminating. As of January 2014, activists had filed 298 Title VI complaints with the EPA, yet only one has been upheld – a success rate of 0.3% (see also Deloitte Consulting, 2011; Mank, 2008; Gordon and Harley, 2005).1 A third and distinct sphere of state engagement is Executive Order 12898. This order, issued by President Clinton in 1994, requires all federal agencies to consider the EJ implications of their activities. A 2003 Civil Rights Commission evaluation of the implementation of EO 12898 by the EPA, Housing and Urban Development, and the Departments of Transportation and Interior found that all four agencies had failed to fully incorporate EJ into their activities (see also Gross and Stretesky, 2015; Guana, 2015; Noonan, 2015). A fourth site for the reproduction of environmental racism is regulatory enforcement. Though definitive assessments cannot yet be made, there is strong evidence to suggest discriminatory enforcement along racial lines, especially in Latina/o communities (Konisky, 2009; Konisky and Reenock, 2013; Lynch et al., 2004; Mennis, 2005).2 Finally, EJ initiatives have been developed in over 30 states (Targ, 2005). These offer a microcosm into the consistent refusal and/or inability to reduce the environmental racism gap. This was apparent, for example, in California’s Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), in which it was knowingly decided to continue allowing pollution concentrations' in vulnerable communities as part of a larger effort to reduce global warming (London et al., 2008, 2013; Lievanos, 2012). III Environmental racism and racial capitalism Failure on such a scale cannot be resolved by tinkering with policy. While geographers typically attribute such dynamics to neoliberalism (Faber, 2008; Holifield, 2007), this is only part of the story. For instance, what is the connection between court decisions that contract the definition of discrimination and neoliberalism? Pellow (2007) is one of the few to combine political economy and race in his analysis of transnational pollution, although Heynen (2015) has made some important moves in this direction. I build on Pellow’s work as well as research from critical ethnic studies to argue that environmental racism is part of racial capitalism.

Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at almost three times the rate of white Americans. As has been widely noted, black people in this country face a variety of systemic public health risks—including higher pollution in neighborhoods and greater rates of asthma and heart disease—that contribute to this high fatality rate. Black and brown people are also more likely to work in industries like food service, care work, shipping, meatpacking, and farm work, where workers are being forced to choose between their lives or their livelihoods, while wealthier white-collar workers are better able to shelter and work remotely. The failures of the federal economic response accentuated these disparities. Wealthier and whiter communities gained quick access to Fed funds in money markets, while black and brown businesses were largely left out of the small business Paycheck Protection Program. Though most people received a one-time $1,200 cash support, debt payments and rent are still due. Working-class families must scratch together money to make these payments, while financiers and landlords retain their revenue streams. The COVID-19 crisis has cast into stark relief what has always been true: the wealth and prosperity of the U.S. economy rests on the labor, and the lives, of black and brown communities. Systemic racial disparities of wealth and health are woven deeply into the fabric of American capitalism. This system of racial capitalism is a result of policy choices that structure our political economy. Modern systems of precarious work are rooted in histories of extractive labor models, from Jim Crow to undocumented immigrant labor. Many black and brown workers were cut out of the twentieth-century New Deal social contract. Zoning policies have deliberately concentrated poverty and pollution—and therefore poor health—in black and brown neighborhoods while securing economic gains and class advantage for wealthier and whiter communities. The rise of predatory systems of student and consumer debt paper over the erosion of the safety net and fuel returns for financial interests. The racialization of 108 D issen t · SUMMER 2020 A protester in front of the 3rd Precinct police building while it burns on May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) 109 THE PANDEMIC public goods, from healthcare to welfare to food stamps, has helped drive austerity and the dismantling of the safety net. These policies are sustained by a set of interests and ideologies. Businesses directly benefit from these extractive economic models. But so too do middle- and upper-class constituencies. An alliance between big business, those hostile to racial integration and the civil rights movement, and anxious and self-interested affluent elites is at the heart of the modern conservative coalition. These political arrangements are legitimated by market fundamentalism and color-blind notions of fairness and neutrality that obfuscate the deep unfreedom and racial hierarchy of our economic system. The COVID-19 crisis exposes the harsh reality of this system. It might also animate a more equitable and inclusive reimagining of our political economy. We need to direct our political energies toward the liberation of black and brown people—and in so doing, secure the liberation for all of us from the inequities of modern capitalism.

Literacy: Digital Writing With, For, and Against Racial Capitalism, Theory Into Practice, DOI:

10.1080/00405841.2020.1857128, acc. 7/15/23)//AS

Jodi Dean’s Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging positions the word comrade against the popular term ally. Dean argues that the idea of the comrade is more collective than ally, which focuses on individual identity. Contrary to stereotypes of the comrade figure as only a white male one, Dean traces the rich history of women and comrades of color in the communist movement. She reasons that what binds comrades together is not based on shared identity, but rather the action of a shared struggle. In this short work, Jodi Dean offers a theory of the comrade: a figure she sets forth as necessary for building a new politics on the Left. Layered with historical accounts of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), Dean argues the figure of the comrade can combat the Left’s antipathy of the party form (a form Dean sees as necessary to politics), the individualized focus of identity politics, and the larger structures of neoliberal capitalism. Her work suggests that the political horizon of the Left must be built on collective struggle, and one way to make this return to the collective is through the figure of the comrade. In Chapter 1, Dean lays out the conceptual bounds of the comrade and distinguishes it from other forms of association. Defining the comrade as “a generic figure for the political relation between those on the same side of a political struggle,”1 Dean argues the comrade carries with it a certain set of expectations – “Comrades have to be able to count on each other even when we don’t like each other and even when we disagree”.2 The comrade decenters the individualized focus that other words of relation or association carry with them. Positioning the comrade against the popularized term “ally,” Dean’s theory of comradeship offers a more concrete path to political change. Since allyship is hyper-identity focused and targets the individual via self-help style guides and tutorials, it misses the larger structural issues at play and positions politics as singularly situated at the individual level. Allyship as a form to fight oppression is politically vacuous. Dean suggests the figure of the comrade is more politically useful because it is grounded in sameness and genericity. Dean goes on to explain the importance of the generic comrade figure in Chapter 2. Using a speculative-composite methodology, Dean mines the history of communism to construct examples that provide moments of “past hopes and old lessons” that can be used under the current conditions of patriarchal racial capitalism.3 Here, Dean spends some time responding to worries that the comrade evokes ideas of and privileges a white, masculine figure. These constructions, Dean argues, ignores the rich history of communism and the work of women comrades and comrades of color (particularly Black comrades) in the communist movement. Thus, the sameness and genericity important for the figure of the comrade does not erase difference, but rather “provides a container indifferent to its contents.”4 A form opposed to the current hyper-focus on identity and the individual, the comrade is a relation that entails taking a side in a struggle. What binds comrades together, then, is not a shared identity or positionality, but a shared commitment to a political struggle. In the age of online allyship and activism, the comrade offers a different path forward. In the past year, Instagram and Twitter feeds have been filled with aesthetically pleasing how-to guides on allyship and lessons on social justice. While potentially informative and useful, Dean argues this approach to political struggle is amorphous, not grounded in concrete action, and politically inadequate. The comrade grounds collective struggle in a sameness that works against the siloing effect of individualized activism. Chapter 3 lays out the four theses of the comrade: 1) the comrade names a relation characterized by sameness, equality, and solidarity; 2) anyone but not everyone can be a comrade; 3) the Individual (as a locus of identity) is the “Other” of the comrade; and 4) the relation between comrades is mediated by a fidelity to a truth. The equality of the comrade is grounded in a relation that cuts through the hierarchical ordering based on race, sex, gender, and/or class in patriarchal capitalist societies. Equality in comradeship is rooted in solidarity; comrades are equal because they are on the same side and share the same struggle. Theses 2 and 3 extend and expand notions of the generic comrade. It is not rooted in a particular identity; thus, anyone can be a comrade. Since comradeship entails taking a side, not everyone can/will be a comrade. Finally, what binds comrades together is “fidelity to the emancipatory egalitarian struggle for communism.”5 Dean also describes four characteristics of the comrade: discipline, joy, enthusiasm, and courage. Because the comrade is bounded by party structure, the party provides discipline that helps direct its comrades. This discipline enables an “intense collectivity” that allows “comrades [to] do the impossible.”6 Comrades experience joy through this “sense of collective invincibility.”7 This then leads to enthusiasm for the collective work – “Enthusiasm is the surplus that collective discipline generates.”8 Above all, comrades are courageous, willing to submit themselves to critique and to constant learning and study that is necessary for collective political work. Dean concludes the book by considering the reasons one decides to no longer be a comrade. Providing four scenarios—expulsion, resignation, drift, and the end of the world—Dean details different circumstances that may lead one to leave the party and end their relationship as a comrade. Dean provides these scenarios of failure as moments of learning. As she reminds readers, “failures happen,” but that does not mean one should not begin.9 The possibility of failure should not foreclose starting. Speaking to skeptics on the Left, Dean argues the organization of the party and comradeship is necessary to combat capitalism. It is only through belonging and collective organizing that substantial political change can be won. Discipline and organization also combat the effects of neoliberalism on the individual and provide them with a necessary framework to organize individuals who are exhausted, overworked, underpaid, lack resources, and so on. Dean’s figure of the comrade is timely given the summer of protests sparked by the police murder of George Floyd. The moment seems ripe for those of the Left to take up Dean’s call to build a collective movement centered around the figure of the comrade. As calls to identity increasingly ring hollow, the comrade provides fertile ground for taking seriously collective organizing that can combat systems of racial capitalism. Unlike shareable Instagram images with easy “how-to” guides on allyship, the comrade can solidify the Left in a more concrete way. Given the last year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the increasingly intensifying racial tension due to state sanctioned violence, and the isolation and exhaustion that comes from living and surviving in a neoliberal capitalist regime, Dean’s comrade reminds us that “sometimes just knowing that we have comrades who share our commitments, our joys, and our efforts to learn from defeats makes political work possible where it was not before.”10 In essence, Dean’s work is a timely read that provides those on the Left with actionable ways to move forward and organize. It speaks to old debates about sameness and difference, but situates them in the current moment of increasing individualization. As any good theoretical work should, it leaves readers with tangible ideas on why and how the figure of the comrade should become our new figure of political belonging.

We begin with the following processes and historical structures expressed as noun phrases: Colonization, dispossession, forced migration, militarization, global hunger, heteropatriarchy, homo/transphobia, racism, climate injustice, the possibilities of classless societies and of emancipation from oppression, the legacies of social differentiation, problems of individuality, alienation and psychopathology, extrajudicial killings, failed and future revolutions, fascist states. Unsurprising that the text before you (like the world around you), in wishing to transform the current calamities, seeks significant aspects for the addressing of local and also world-historical problems in the yet-living and new knowledges of the politically marginalized, and in the socialities and world-making capacities of the oppressed. It should also be unsurprising that counter-power is to be found in the aesthetic, the affective, the organizational, the resonant, the performative, the cybernetic – the living tissues that mediate our objects, be they nouns or machines. However, the key question posed on this occasion regards especially this last notion, the cybernetic interdependence of all planetary denizens: the emerging media of the social, psychological and ecological interconnection and disaster. We refer to the objectified and objectifying processes whose functionality overdetermines the conditions of living: textualization, photography, datification, computation, monetization. Therefore the question of cyber-mediation must also include the question of the media of reparative expression and decolonial resurgence. In a world with so much pain and so many cries, lamentations and organized actions against oppression, we ask aloud: How can we keep the calls and struggles for solidarity, for justice, for liberation from oppression from being absorbed and reincorporated into what are now the default racial capitalist production regimens? How to keep practices of radical care, food assistance, mutual aid and collective concern from collapsing back into feeding racial capitalism and its mediation of life on Earth? A perennial question, one urgently posed by capital’s power to turn revolt into profit. What may be surprising here is the strategy by which we propose to navigate the political economy of mediation and the social relations that its global operating system would organize. We propose it in order to move towards an answer that is not supportive of neo-liberal sharing in the dividends of global extraction. There is no neo-liberal solution just as there is no end to world-historical violence under racial capitalism. In what follows, this navigation takes the form of an hypothesis offered in the imperative: We must attack money and we must decolonize it. With this theme of an an attack on money for the purposes of its (and our) decolonization in mind and in the imagination, explored through teachings from the critique of political economy, we aim for something unorthodox: to reimagine the protocols of monetary media in order to transcend racial capitalism and its colonial order. It’s ordering. Critical race theory, feminism, abolition feminism, media theory, decolonial writings and radical finance would indicate that such transformation is only possible if we constantly access our aesthetic and affective capacities as a poetics of relation: their/our powers of persistence, survival, and facility for relation, forms of knowledge and care that can be mounted against, in spite of, and in excess of oppression. And radical transformation that would include liberation from various forms of oppression as well as decolonial resurgence is possible only as a collective and, ultimately, a global project—as practice and as politics. We could even say “as program,” a program, or rather a programming, for the overcoming of racial capitalism and a revaluation of value(s). Existing monetary media (for the moment, think “money as capital”) have through and as computation grafted themselves to all other media forms—monetization underpins social mediation (as language, practice, information, etc.) at 0 to n levels of remove— today all utterance and all expression is tied to computation and financialization, just as plastic and pollutants permeates the global ecosystem. The tractor beams of finance leave no utterance uninflected. The current program for global expression, which is at base a financial one, entails a continuous reprogramming, a semiotic and financial re-encoding of the futures scripted and thus articulated by capital. Through a kind of cybernetic detournement, these futures must be redirected, as co-authored futures (this term is intended in both the temporal and financial sense, and authorship here expresses both the author-function and authority). The co-authorship and indeed collective authorship of futures is to be understood here as a practical poetics of both expression and production. It involves not only new modes of expression, but new forms of writing and of platforming writing. A poetics of relation may yet inform our futures, our post-capitalist economies to be. Many recently published and forthcoming books, among them Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid, Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse, Safiya Umoja Nobel’s Algorithms of Oppression, Mark Alizart’s Cryptocommunism, Robert Meister’s Justice is an Option, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s The End of the Cognitive Empire, Bauwens, Kostakis and Pazaitis’s Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons, and also their All Incomplete, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures, Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done are reaching for this beyond capital. From within it. From a within that is also a without—an “immanent outside.” In different ways, yes, but there is widespread agreement regarding the pernicious bankruptcy, accumulated injustice, and global failures of the current system. These books and their discourses are among the conversations that we would engage here. Ambient in the ether we find sustained attention to problems with logistics, informatics and computation, attention to postcapitalism, attention to abolition feminism, to afro-futurism and Black futures, and to decolonization. We find anti-imperialist, workerist and queer positions. Those seriously seeking post-capitalist alternatives are aware of the violence of settler colonialism, of land-grabbing, radical dispossession, genocide, policing militarization, fascism, imperialism, economic extraction and outright war. We are aware of this thing called racial capitalism and that, as Jodi Melamed says, “racial capitalism is capitalism.” And then there is the protest and forced migration rising up on our screens and in the streets all around the world. But writing cannot simply remain what we know as writing if our criticisms and laments are to be much more than poetic gestures and beautiful hauntologies. From (and as) the living remains of communism (our anarchive) we must seek, and seek practically, collectivization. The poetic function of our texts of liberation contains within itself the world-making crystals of radical social change. In preserving the legacies of struggle and the calls for justice by revitalizing them in the present, they already program changes in sensibility and sociality that could change the world. However, much of the disruption created by these programs is enclosed by the media-environment, which is to say the semiotic and financial limits imposed by capitalist hegemony. The collectivization of the means and media of production, and for now let’s also say a redistributing of risk (and reward) by collectivizing, democratizing and communizing the authorship of the terms of value (yes, the terms), which means, precisely, its expressions, its abstractions, its codes becomes the fundamental political challenge of the 21st century. We seek to intervene in systems of accounting and of account and the forms of numeracy that inform, encode, and functionalize expression. We must explore the integrated circuits between expressivity and the registration, archivization and functionalization of all forms of writing in the social. For some of us, it may be difficult to understand dollars, RMB, Euros, Pesos and Rubles as forms of writing, units of account inscribed on media, capable of producing state changes in ledgers, just as it is sometimes difficult to remember that computation is also writing—algorithmic writing—1s and 0s registered and erased according to rulesets.

Does this bring to the fore the ways this model is temporal while evading the ‘rhetorical energy’ (Eriksen et al., Citation2012, p. 13) such temporalities mobilize? Yes. The temporal dimensions of the Capitalocene are central to the conversation of the ecological challenges and growing sense of urgency. Debates and analytical frameworks focusing on how to secure a ‘good life’ today and in the future or attempting to alter the unsustainable trajectories of the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene have colonial structures of time at the heart of their epistemes. If colonial time is at the heart of understanding capitalism, then time is also at the heart of understanding the ‘present’ and the ‘history’ of ecological concerns and issues. Racial capitalism co-constitutes certain categories of historical temporality; all historicisms presume these categories as a given. Any debate about to whom the earth belongs and its exhaustion should problematize whether the colonial expansion of the planetary project’s structure of time and temporality (i.e. climate disasters, environmental emergencies) mediates the trajectory of the unfolding of power in the form of events and causal relationships, giving them coherence. Desiring to shame the agents for our planetary crisis personalizes the issues and leads to an impossibility of depicting future and history as ‘history.’ Narrations that depict the creation and evolution of crises in linear temporal terms (i.e. the present is dangerous) or in eschatological orientations by claiming the present orients us toward the ‘threat of the end of time’ (Fagan, Citation2019, pp. 55–63; cited in Rothe, Citation2020, p. 145) are themselves technologies. Not only do they displace conquest and theft long enough to evade the stakes in considering such moments and their un/thinkability, but they also facilitate the ongoing and violent displacements that racial capitalism’s flux of energies and environmental degradation demands. How can we grapple with histories whose temporal operational structures are themselves presumed? And how are we to understand the decolonial and the creation of a planetary whose primary values are not unlimited conquest, growth, and supposed progress when the majority of the world seems to be arriving as a historical afterthought to imperial and colonial power?

The US Black Panther Party (BPP) has long been an inspiration and intellectual touchstone for anti-racist and anti-fascist movements around the globe. Thanks to their promotion of community self-defence and survival programmes, their role in developing an aesthetics of Black pride and rebellion, and their accompanying critiques of police, state and carceral violence, racial and capitalist exploitation, and global imperialism, the Party’s place as one of the most significant revolutionary movements of the 20th century is assured. In the 21st century, against a backdrop of mounting racial oppression and economic stratification, and specifically in the aftermath of the brutal police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the worldwide protests that erupted in response, the Party is perhaps more relevant than ever, with its tactics and analyses forming an integral component of the genealogy of contemporary Black radicalism. In this paper we show how the BPP developed a radical and valuable account of the politics of militarism. By reflecting on their participation in the anti-Vietnam War movement, on their analysis of the ghetto as a colonised and occupied space, and through an excavation of Panther leader Huey P. Newton’s theory of ‘intercommunalism’, we outline an account of militarism that foregrounds the politics of race and coloniality. This account emphasises the interactions of racial capitalism, the privatisation of warfare, violent practices of un/bordering, and police power, allowing both for a substantive account of present-day militarism as well as radical inhabitations of anti-militarism. Within International Relations (IR), scholarship on militarism has seen a considerable resurgence in recent years. A key concept during the Cold War, militarism was pushed to the margins of academic inquiry by a combination of liberal triumphalism and security hegemony (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012; Stavrianakis and Stern 2018). Few beyond feminist scholars paid serious attention to developing and using the concept (Enloe 2000; Cockburn 2012). More recently, there has been a renewed interest in concept of militarism as a way of making sense of the embeddedness of war-like relations in contemporary ‘liberal’ societies, and of accounting for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organisation of political violence (Basham 2013; Rossdale 2019; Stavrianakis and Selby 2012). Building on the insights generated by this important body of work, this article seeks to spotlight race and racism in contemporary militarism. It departs from much of the literature, however, by arguing that racism and coloniality are not epiphenomenal or merely ‘facets’ of militarism but are in fact integral to its functioning. By highlighting a persistent shortcoming in IR scholarship on militarism – that is, the limited account of race and coloniality – we do not mean to imply that these categories are completely absent. Rather our claim is that race, racism and empire are frequently positioned as secondary to what are considered more fundamental features through which political violence is entrenched and made possible. This absence, or more accurately, subsumption of race and coloniality severely limits the concept of militarism. More problematically, it produces analyses which normalise or overlook the violence to and through which racialised subjects are targeted, subjected and enlisted. It produces accounts of militarism and its associated hierarchies (war/peace, normal/exception, violence/nonviolence) that reproduce the very foundations through which racialised violence is made possible. In contrast, and writing alongside others who view racism as foundational to militarism (Howell 2018, Khalid 2015; Parashar 2018; Stuurman 2020), in this article we put forward an account of contemporary militarism that is intrinsically concerned with the politics of both race and colonialism. We develop our argument through a sustained encounter with the Black Panther Party (BPP), a Black radical organisation active across the US and internationally between 1966-1974. From its origins in Oakland, California, the BPP grew quickly, electrifying Black radical politics by combining a potent analysis of racial and capitalist exploitation with practical organising and a new aesthetics of pride and rebellion (Heath 1973). At its peak the BPP was one of the dominant revolutionary forces within the US, with 68 chapters in cities across the country alongside an international section headquartered in Algeria and close relationships with political organisations throughout Asia, Africa and across Europe. (Bloom and Martin 2013: 2-3). The Panthers were taken seriously enough that the US state directed a massive programme of violent repression against them. They were notable for their use of armed self-defence against agents of the state, for their extensive community survival projects which included the provision of free medical care, legal support, and a massive breakfasts for children programme, and for an internationalism which drew intimate connections between the experience of the ghetto and global anti-colonial struggle. In the paper we show how the particular analysis developed by BPP members, manifested both in the accounts of key figures – especially Newton - and the embodied politics of movement, offers an important reading of the politics of contemporary militarism. In the initial section of the paper we show how the Panthers’ often-uneasy participation in the anti-Vietnam War peace movement demonstrated the limitations of conceptualisations of militarism which overlook or subordinate policing and racialised state violence. We then examine how the BPP challenged the spatial and statist contours through which militarism is often understood by offering a sustained critique grounded in their analysis of the ghetto as a colonized space and their understanding of the police as an army of occupation. This account urges a rethinking of conventional distinctions between war and peace, international and domestic, and sets up an understanding of militarism that begins with racist exploitation and policing. The second half of the paper develops this account further by engaging the concept of ‘intercommunalism’, introduced by Newton in 1970 to theorise the declining importance of nation states and corresponding emergence of neoliberal racial capitalism. We submit that intercommunalism, as a re-orientation of prominent understandings of imperialism away from the state and towards a political economy of imperial extraction and power projection, grounds a formidable account of militarism. This intercommunal theory of militarism is constitutively attentive to the interactions of racial capitalism, police power, and the uneven, albeit simultaneous, withering away and intensification of state practices. We expound on this first through Newton’s speeches and writing on the subject, and subsequently through a case study of martial relations between the US and Israel. This was a relationship that was of some interest to the Panthers, both because it represented particularly violent practices of empire, and important possibilities for resistance and solidarity. We show how an intercommunal account of militarism calls attention to the operations of racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering, and police power in this relationship, as well as some potential routes for international solidarity and a radical anti-militarist politics.

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature–political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on care—to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, ena- bling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular pro- cesses, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the up- risings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships. KEYWORDS black feminisms, care, COVID-19, health, political ecology, racial capitalism, the body 1 | INTRODUCTION The COVID-19 pandemic has made long-standing racial, gender, ability, and other inequities clear while also exac- erbating them. As these immense disparities came into view in the spring of 2020, another form of risk reappeared: the extrajudicial murder of Black and brown people by police. If COVID-19 made plain the ways that systemic racial injustices bear down on individual bodies, the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 highlighted the intensity with which the lives of entire groups of people, in this case Black people, truly matter less. Across the US, and around the world, protests erupted: protests for the mattering of black lives, protests for the freedom to breathe, protests against the “ontological negation” and “ontological terror” (2018) that a global pandemic, police brutality, “parasitic Geography Compass. 2022;16:e12609. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/gec3 © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1 of 15 https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12609 2 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ governance” (Wang, 2018), and life under racial capitalism produce. As Frantz Fanon is often credited with saying, “we revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 111).1 A coronavirus sur- vivor himself, Floyd's last words, “I can't breathe,” became the mantra of the protests in the pandemic. In this article, we examine the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, its disproportionate impact on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian (BBIA)2 people, and what a more just future focused on relationships and care might look like. The mass uprising also sparked global conversations about institutional racism and its impact on health. In the US, more than 1200 public health officials signed a letter declaring racism a public health issue and supporting the protests amidst the pandemic as a surge of cities across the country adopted the framework, officially. Globally, the UN passed a number of resolutions that condemn anti-Black violence and stress that racism and xenophobia have no place in the pandemic response. These officials acknowledged what so many activists had long known: that Black people (and Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people) should have the right to “breathe free” (Sharpe, 2016). Across the globe, solidarity protests erupted—many further spurred by local acts of police violence. In Nigeria, tens of thousands took to the streets to protest the brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) against youth; tens of thousands took to the streets in cities across France to protest the 2016 police murder of Adama Traoré; and in Colombia, protestors took to the streets for Anderson Arboleda, to name just a few. As the protests continued in this pandemic, mutual aid societies and other collective caring models picked up strength (Fuentenebro, 2020). These efforts included pop-up food banks, vacant home reclamation and occupation, crowdsourced hardship funds, free online medical-consultation, mass donations of PPE, mask-making at home, and more. Zoom-based teach-ins, and seminars on starting mutual aid networks and movement building were suddenly available to anyone who had an internet connection. These endeavors mark a concerted effort to move away from the masculinist sensibility of care-as-protection toward a more grounded form of redistribution-as-care, all while recognizing individual bodies as social bodies (Lopez & Neely, 2021; Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987). This model offers a path toward what the Black Panther Party called self-determination (Nelson, 2011); a world where everyone can survive and thrive, a world that Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, trans and disabled people fight for and build themselves (Bledsoe et al., 2019). If we have learned anything from this moment, it is that there is a political will to care (Jankó, 2020; Méndez et al., 2020)—to sit with the uncomfortability of thinking about and trying to address both the legacies and current iteration of racial capitalism and the impact they have on the health and lives of the most vulnerable members of society. Whether or not things will change in the long run remains to be seen. To think through both the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-Black violence and what they tell us about health, inequality, and care we bring together the literatures of political ecologies of health and the body (PEH), Black ge- ographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist approaches to care. We argue that these three bodies of litera- ture place different kinds of relationships at their analytical center, and together they offer an important model for understanding health in the context of inequality brought on by racial capitalism. In the next section, we explore political ecologies of health, which center more-than-human relationships at multiple scales from inside of bodies to large-scale political economies. Next, we detail the literature on racial capitalism, which forces us to recognize and reckon with the co-constitution of racism and capitalism in that political economy. The following section unpacks the literature on care, especially work by Black feminists. Writing from the same place as scholars of racial capital- ism, Black feminist work on care pushes against neoliberal frameworks of individualism and autonomy, recognizing interrelatedness both as material fact and as ground through which to imagine worlds otherwise. We conclude by bringing these literatures together to make sense of this ongoing pandemic in the context of global anti-Blackness, focusing on questions of racism and anti-black violence, in particular, and their impact on both society and the body. So doing, we argue that while a PEH infused with racial capitalism helps to explain the uneven and unjust impacts of the pandemic, a Black feminist ethic of care helps to imagine a different, more just future. 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License NEELY and LOPEZ 3 of 15 2 | POLITICAL ECOLOGIES OF HEALTH AND THE BODY [W]hat I've seen over the years of my research and lifetime is that the stressors that impact people of color are chronic and repeated through their whole life course....And that increases a general health vulnerability — which is what weathering is – Arlene Geronimus. (Sandoiu, 2021) Recent work in political ecologies of health (PEH) takes up the question of race and its differential impacts on the health of BBIA people. This comes out of the combination of political ecology's concern with how capitalism and ecology—the social and the biological—work together to produce environmental problems and uneven illness (Jackson & Neely, 2015; King, 2010; Mansfield, 2008; Nichols & Casino, 2020) and environmental justice's focus on the impact of (racial) capitalism and the environment on human health (Harrison, 2008; Heynen, 2003; Holif- ield, 2001; Pulido, 1996, 2000, 2006). As Madison Barbour and Julie Guthman (2018) write, environmental justice focuses on “structural and political vulnerabilities that make certain populations more likely to be exposed to environ- mental health hazards” (p. 334) like pollution and other damage (Heynen, 2003; Holifield, 2001; Pulido, 2000, 2006). As these scholars demonstrate, and as health geographers interested in “neighborhood effects” have long shown (e.g., Finch et al., 2010; Weden et al., 2011), contaminated environments are disproportionately inhabited by poor and non-white people, and they come to matter as they make people sick. With its focus on human-environment relationships, broadly defined, PEH centers human health in ways that move beyond environmental justice literature, to include work on vector- and water-borne illness (Carter, 2008; Ferring & Hausermann, 2019; Nading, 2014), nutrition (Guthman, 2011; Heynen, 2009, 2010; Neely, 2021b), infectious disease (Craddock, 2015; King, 2017; Neely, 2015), ambiguous or uncertain environmental contact (Haus- ermann, 2015, 2020; Neely, 2021a, 2021b; Senanayake, 2019), and environmental toxins and contaminants (Guth- man & Mansfield, 2013, 2015; Nading, 2017; Sultana, 2012). A particularly important aspect of political ecologies of health is a focus on the body, what Allison and Jessica Hayes-Conroy have termed a political ecology of the body. The Hayes-Conroys (2013, 2015) offer a “visceral” body with a focus on the affective and emotive to attend to structural forces and bodily experience beyond the material. One of us, Abigail Neely (2015), integrates the scale of the body by attending to the “internal ecologies” of rural African people as she rethinks taken-for-granted understandings of disease in a broader context of global health programs and local environments. And Julie Gutman and Becky Mans- field (2015) build on environmental justice literature, but center the body, arguing that bodily ecologies cannot be separated from environmental flows. Bringing this work together, Cari Nichols and Vincent Del Casino (2020) argue that “the body is not a ‘boundary’ or ‘blurred,’ but rather ontologically co-constituted through power-laden relations with more-than-human actors (e.g., microbes, nutrients, air) and also affective, non-representable forces” (p. 2). Tak- en together and echoing the insights of environmental justice, this work recognizes the ways in which capitalism (Guthman, 2011), race (Mansfield & Guthman, 2015), gender (Sultana, 2012, 2021), and experience (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2015) ensure uneven exposure and unequal health impacts that almost always fall along predictable axes of oppression, as we have seen with the COVID-19 pandemic. We find two emerging strands of PEH particularly generative for thinking with the literature on racial capitalism and Black feminisms to understand COVID-19 in the context of anti-Blackness: PEH that attends to race and racial capitalism and PEH that attends to intergenerational health consequences. In a recent Progress Report on geographies of race and ethnicity, Laura Pulido (2017) argues for a more significant linking of literatures of environmental justice and racial capitalism. So doing, she argues that racial capitalism restructures the environment in ways that not only build from, but create racial difference, and further that these processes reshape bodies. She writes, “[Racial] capital- ism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level” as “racially devalued bodies” become pollution “sinks” (Pulido, 2017, p. 529). Because people of color are deemed expendable, industry can pollute in the places in which they live, building profits out of their inhumanity. One of us, Neely (2021b), argues that racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa, which started from the position that Africans were inherently inferior, shaped everything from labor and employment patterns to nutritional science to health and infectious diseases and to the policies and 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 4 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ programs to address them (see also, Wylie, 2001). The result is ongoing large racial disparities in morbidity and mor- tality and limited possibilities to address them. Barbour and Guthman (2018) take up the questions of racial capitalism in their examination of pregnant farmworker exposure to pesticides in a context where farmworker knowledge is devalued as bodies are harmed for profit. They write, “it is not only immigration policy and the precarious legal status of farmworkers that makes for their vulnerability to pesticide exposure, but the racist logics embedded in capitalism itself that renders certain bodies vulnerable and disposable” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 335). Drawing on Pulido and thinking through the epigenetic impacts of pesticides, they argue that industrial agriculture may offer an example of “how racial capitalism transforms bodies at the cellular level” (Barbour & Guthman, 2018, p. 337). Mansfield and Guthman also address questions of race and racism in their work on epigenetics. In critically in- terrogating the science, they argue that epigenetics offers a new way to pathologize difference—in the relationships between genes and the environment—which reifies existing racial inequality (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, 2015; Mansfield & Guthman, 2015). In this work, they also examine the intergenerational imaginations and impacts of epi- genetics through the long-term and multi-generational effects of environmental exposure. According to the science of epigenetics, the exposures of grandparents can effect grandchildren's genetic makeup even if those children never have the exposures their ancestors did, thus rendering the body temporally elastic. Mansfield and Guthman see epigenetics as a way to understand how histories of inequality manifest in bodies and shape differential health out- comes and health futures. They write, “Researchers are discovering biological pathways through which social stresses such as racial discrimination and joblessness are somatized....can be cumulative... [and] can be embodied. These observations are leading to new theorizations about biology and race such that biological difference—not reduced to genomics—can be an effect of social relations” (Guthman & Mansfield, 2013, p. 11). This approach is important because it recognizes the biological impact of the “histories that produce inequality in resource access and wealth in the construction of racial difference” (Lafferty, 2012). And this is important for understanding the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it relates to anti-Blackness through what are commonly known as pre-existing conditions like asthma, heart disease, and diabetes. The next section offers an in-depth examination of how racial disparities come to be in the first place through an analysis of the literature on racial capitalism, and why they matter to both individual bodies and society, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. 3 | BLACK GEOGRAPHIES AND RACIAL CAPITALISM What do we do with the profoundly disturbing impossibility of black geographies that unfold into prisons, north stars, apartheids, and swaths of premature death? (McKittrick, 2016, p. 98) Since the start of the millennium there has been an increasing interest in questions of racial capitalism in the social sciences and humanities, including in geography. Racial capitalism is a term coined by Cedric Robinson (2000) in his monumental book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Much of the recent scholarship on racial capitalism draws on this foundational work and is rooted in literature from and about the Black experience in North America and the Caribbean. Racial capitalism highlights and insists upon the recognition that capitalism has, since its evolution out of feudalism, been grounded in and dependent on racial differentiation (Robinson, 2000). Or, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2015) says, “Capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” As such, racial capitalism is not simply a descriptor of the ways in which race and capitalism intersect, but rather, an insistence that capitalism has always been predicated on racial difference; that capitalism and racism are co-constituted (Robinson, 2000). A number of scholars, including geographers, write about racial capitalism today. In particular, Black geographies attends “to the ways in which current forms of capitalism renew themselves through racialized violence” (Bledsoe et al., 2019, p. 4). For example, focusing on California, Gilmore (2007) details how racial capitalism's need for unfree labor for profit has led to the mass incarceration of Black people who then serve as prison laborers. Noah Zatz (2020) builds on this to argue that the work requirements embedded in debt payments, probation, and parole extend the 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License NEELY and LOPEZ 5 of 15 logics of “carceral work mandates,” allowing employers to use state violence to discipline workers. In both cases, these unfree and less-than-free workers are disproportionately Black men whose labor has always been key for the extraction of profit under racial capitalism. Adam Bledsoe and Willie Wright (2019) push this further to under- stand global capitalism, arguing that anti-Blackness is necessary for its perpetuation. The production of surplus value through the exploitation of the global majority has been a crucial and cruel reality for many of the essential jobs that have in theory kept everyone healthy, but have in reality kept the capitalist class and mostly wealthy people healthy, fed, housed, and safe as they work from home during the pandemic. By contrast, low wage workers in grocery stores, meat packing plants, hospitals, restaurants, farms, and factories have taken on much of the risk of illness. In the pan- demic, capitalism continues thanks to racialized and gendered exploitation. While not necessarily employing the term racial capitalism directly, there are other generative strands of thought in Black Studies and postcolonial studies that help illuminate the idea of racial capitalism. For example, postcolonial scholars elaborate on abandonment as an operationalization of racial capitalism that both dispossesses and enacts violence along a spectrum up to and including ethnic cleansing (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Achille Mbembe (2017) dubs this “black reason,” in an effort to capture the entwining of economic, epistemological, and psychic violence in Africa. And of course, Frantz Fanon (2005) writes about the ways in which the intersecting processes of race and class are linked, affecting individual's psychology, and helping to define what it means to be human. In his analysis of what is today called racial capitalism, Fanon allows, in the words of Camilla Hawthorne and Kaily Heitz (2018), Black life to be non-reducible. In geography, racial capitalism has emerged as an important analytical thread within the emerging subfield of Black geographies (Bledsoe, 2020). Black geographies developed in response to a discipline that has willfully ex- cluded the lives and experiences—the epistemologies and ontologies—of Black people and Black spatial processes (Bledsoe, 2021). As Katherine McKittrick (2006) writes, Black geographies are “subaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work alongside and beyond traditional geographies and a site of terrain of struggle” (p. 7). Black geogra- phies as we think of the field today has antecedents stretching back to the middle of the last century (Pulido, 2017). In a recent Progress article, Bledsoe (2021) traces these antecedents to the work of Harold Rose and Bill Bunge, arguing that the focus on question of what we call racial capitalism today emerged in the 1990s with the work of Bobby Wilson, Clyde Woods, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore. These scholars offer understandings of urban geography as predicated on segregation and racial capitalism (Wilson, 2019), the overriding plantation logics of the south and the life-making processes of Black people (Lewis, 2020; Woods, 1998), and the prison-industrial complex's need for cheap labor within an economic system stratified by a racial hierarchy (Gilmore, 2007). Pulido (2017) notes that more and more scholars, especially political ecologists, have become interested in questions of racial capitalism over the past decade. She writes, “[T]he ideas are not necessarily new. What is new is the term, the intellectual moment, and the political urgency. The time is ripe for a deep engagement with racial capitalism” (Pulido, 2017, p. 526). Recog- nizing the importance of a focus on racial capitalism, McKittrick (2014) calls for an understanding of Black life that exceeds an economic logic that sees Black people as property, which Hawthorne (2019) sees as possible through an attention to the minutiae of everyday life. In drawing on racial capitalism, we center the differential experiences, illness, and death of BBIA people due to COVID-19 within longer histories of capital expropriation and exploitation. Theorists of racial capitalism have long argued that from its inception, capitalist accumulation has been dependent upon the vulnerability and disposability of racialized bodies (Mbembe, 2017; Pulido, 2017), building as it did through the expansion of empire. Racial capitalism at once renders subjects vulnerable to “hyper exploitation and expropriation in the economic domain and vulerab[le] to premature death in the political and social domains” (Wang, 2018, p. 122). Taking the lessons of racial capitalism to health and the body, Gilmore (2019) argues that the fiction of race has an impact on the human body. She says, “As racial capitalism takes it out of people's hides, the contradiction of skin becomes clearer.” McKittrick (2016) ex- tends this focus on the body to argue that racial capitalism refuses black humanity. Put another way, Bledsoe and Wright (2019) argue that the assumed absence of value in Black life makes global capitalism possible, and further that race is a condition of existence “that leads to premature death” (Bledsoe, 2020, p. 474). Taken together, geographers 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License 6 of 15 NEELY and LOPEZ studying racial capitalism understand it as a system predicated on a racial hierarchy that deems Black people dispos- able. It is this logic, in conversation with the literature on PEH that helps us understand the differential impacts of the pandemic—biomedically, socially, and economically. Central to work in geography and allied disciplines on racial capitalism is a focus on the relationship between capitalism and racial hierarchies that exists from the start. As Gilmore explains, “[R]acial capitalism, which is to say all capitalism, is not a thing, it's a relation” (Card, 2020). Fighting racial capitalism and the unequal world order it constitutes—enacting worlds otherwise—requires a reorganization of relationships. The Black radical tradition from which the idea of racial capitalism emerged, and Black feminism in particular, offers a different vision of relationships, which we explore more fully in the next section. As Jodi Melamed (2015) writes and as the protests in the summer of 2020 enacted, “[T]he Black radical tradition is antiracist, anticapitalist, and collective-making because it is a name for struggles that arrange social forces for Black survival over and against capital accumulation” (p. 80). Recogniz- ing racial capitalism as a particular kind of structuring relation and focusing on the minutiae of the everyday in the broader national and global context of anti-Blackness allows us to begin to understand the uneven impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as emerging from an ethos of antirelationality. As we turn to next, by focusing on responses to the pandemic that center care and by exploring Black feminist work on care, we begin to see possible alternatives. 4 | BLACK FEMINIST CARE Care is a practice for tending to what has already been lost and what might be lost, a political tool for the maintenance of the self and the collective, that is always oppositional to the logic of the state...[and] thus a practice of being deeply attuned to historical and ongoing violence, and to living in the midst of it, a strategy for examining black life and the structures that seek to constrain life. (Nash, 2018, p. 79) Care labor is everyone's labor—it is what not only sustains each individual through physical and emotional support, it is also the work of building social relations, community, and modes of relationality (Woodly et al., 2021). Women, BBIA people, and immigrants make up a disproportionate number of care laborers, many of whom live at or near poverty levels. Many face heightened precarity due to poor labor regulations (Burnham & Theodore, 2012; England & Alcorn, 2018) and increased exposure to injury and disability (Hopkins, 2017). This precarity is perpetuated by an assumption that one should sacrifice for the people in their care and that love for others and for the work is compen- sation in and of itself (Yu, 2018). During the pandemic, many care laborers have faced an outsized risk of exposure to COVID-19 even as they have no or little access to health care (Kaur-Gill, 2020; Méndez et al., 2020; Nasol & Francisco-Menchavez, 2021). Migrant care workers—both documented and undocumented—across the globe are particularly vulnerable (Sbicca et al., 2020; Silvey & Parreñas, 2020). The exploitation of care laborers stems from the differentiation of racial capitalism at multiple, entangled scales, and maps onto colonial relations of racialized hierar- chies of power (Noxolo et al., 2012; Raghuram, 2012). The rise of racial capitalism also brought with it new gendered relations of power through an idealized distinc- tion between so-called men's productive and women's social reproductive labors—a split that was never a reality for poor and racialized families (Glenn, 2012). Indeed, scholars have argued that capital accumulation was only pos- sible through the invisibilized labor of women and enslaved people, in terms of both the biological reproduction of the labor force and in the everyday labor of social reproduction (scholars have called this an ongoing form of primitive accumulation) (Federici, 2014; Mies, 2014; Weinbaum, 2019). The latter half of the 20th century saw a hardening of capitalist logics, globally. During this period, structural adjustment programs, which were rolled out in response to the global debt crisis of the 1980s, destroyed the last vestiges of the commons and further devolved social reproduction to individuals and their families (Federici, 2014). In turn, much of the labor of social reproduc- tion—the “the fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (Katz, 2011, p. 711)—shifted more deeply onto 17498198, 2022, 2, Downloaded from https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gec3.12609 by University Of Michigan Library, Wiley Online Library on [10/07/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License NEELY and LOPEZ 7 of 15 under-paid, over-worked, and highly exploited care laborers as more and more women entered the workforce. Yet much of the mainstream scholarship on care and care ethics is Euro- or Western-centric (Green & Lawson, 2011; Raghuram, 2016), lacking an intersectional analysis (Hankivsky, 2014; Raghuram, 2019), and ignoring the long history of Black feminists attention to care. Black feminist care analysis has always been intersectional and accounted for racial capitalism. These scholars and activists recognize racial capitalism as the structure against which an ethic of care must be mobilized in order to exceed the care-less-ness of what Patricia Hill Collins (2002) calls the “matrix of domination.”3 Often grounded in othermothering and revolutionary mothering, Black feminist care ethics is rooted in the practices of women caring for children intergenerationally and across the community—a practice that stretches back to West Africa and to slavery. Othermothering is the revolutionary act of challenging western conceptions of family and care, enfolding it into social and political activism (Butler, 2019; James, 1993; McDonald, 1997). Black feminist care ethics begins from culture work, or “the entire way a community organizes to nurture itself and future generations” (Reagon, 1996, pp. 168, 170; see also; Barry & Grady, 2019). As an expression of culture work, othermothering is “the bridge work that requires confronting the very real barriers that oppression places in our way and also finding love and power by facing the bar- riers that divide us from each other across geopolitical divides” (Gumbs et al., 2016, pp. 5, 6). As such, it refuses the insistence on the gender binary, offering, instead, potentiality (Spillers, 2003) by defying neoliberal temporalities and individualization that are grounded in hetero-normative, patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism (Crawley, 2020). As Sosa-Provencio (2016) writes, “...caring is necessarily political, transformative, and rooted in the collective uplift of those struggling to overcome these forces of oppression in their daily lives” (p. 306). Care ethics is a politics of relationality and as such it is necessarily multi-scalar, moving beyond neoliberal capital- ism's insistence on the atomized individual and family and a vision of care-as-protection. The global protests against anti-Black violence in the summer of 2020 and increasing interest in police abolition were a direct recrimination of the pervasiveness of the masculinist formation of care-as-protection. “Care,” in this frame, is violence. Abolition movements are a call to shift this framing toward building communities of care and support, toward a Black feminist vision of care (Okechukwu, 2021). Black feminists offer an approach to care that always recognizes the influence of racial capitalism. With this framing, care ethics pushes for an attention to “mutual vulnerability,” transformation, and mutual responsibility (Nash, 2018). For a feminist care ethics to fulfill its promise as a transformative ethos, it must center race, racism, and racial capitalism as the ground from which care and relationships emerge. As Christina Sharpe (2016) puts it, this care is bound up in “wake work,” where “care in the wake [is] a problem for thinking of and for Black non/being in the world...[it] is a work that insists and performs that thinking needs care (‘all thought is Black thought’) and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake” (p. 5). This wake work necessarily entails “multispecies assemblages” of care that move beyond the “the racial and colonial logics of the abstract universal anthropos” upon which the current ecological crisis is pinned (Davis et al., 2019, p. 3). This notion of the “Anthropocene,” scholars argue, flattens humanity to a singular monolith and fails to account for the uneven impacts of the climate crisis, and we would add, global pandemics. It also fails to consider whose labor and lives were, and still are, enrolled in these processes under violence, oppression, exploitation, and expropriation (Davis et al., 2019; see also H.; Davis & Todd, 2017; Karera, 2019; Pulido, 2018). Indeed, as Françoise Vergés argues (2017, p. 74), the Anthropocene and the politics of climate change rest on “the politics of nonraciality beneath which...lurk more sinister shadows of the racial everyday and persistent institutional and structural racisms—and racial capital- ism.” As with PEH, this attention to non-human entanglements, especially in the context of racial capitalism, helps us understand why certain people (marginalized care givers who disproportionately have preexisting conditions) get sicker from COVID-19. When combined, the literature on PEH and racial capitalism helps to explain the pandemic in the context of anti-Blackness, while, as we turn to next, Black feminist work on care offers us a possible new way forward.

Put another way, is racism like a Cadillac, the metaphor Malcolm X proposed that is, a renewable, mass-produced form of ideological and social violence running parallel to, and intersecting with, commodity production? Or is racism actually an integral component of making Cadillacs: a practical dimension of enforcing wage discipline and extracting surplus value? Rather than jumping to a definitive resolution between these choices, it is worth observing how a certain oscillation between them comes to comprise what Robinson calls "the black radical tradition." Thus, W. E. B. Du Bois, whom Robinson describes as "one of the first American theorists to sympathetically confront Marxist thought in critical and independent terms” (207), leaned toward the first option, arguing that Marxism failed to "envisage a situation where instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of class by race, cutting square across the economic layers" (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 205). C. L. R. James, second to Du Bois in Robinson's pantheon of Black radical intellectual protagonists, emphasized the latter, when he described Caribbean sugar plantations as the incubator of the first modern proletariat: “The half savage slaves of Santo Domingo ... showing them- selves subject to the same historical laws as the advanced workers of revolutionary Paris" (quoted in Black Marxism, 385). Differing emphases upon racism's moral valences and economic func- tion have similarly shaped different strategic and political conceptions of “race” and “community” versus “labor” and “class” organization. Emigrating to the United States in the 1930s, James agreed with those who thought Black self-organization was “backward,” even “reactionary,” in a context of industrial working-class struggle. The politics of the New Deal, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor upsurge, and communist party influence led a rising cohort of Black activists and intellectuals to reject middle-class presumptions of older race leadership. To them, Du Bois's politics, even as he grew more radical during the 1930s, continued to rest on an outmoded racial premise. Abram Harris summed up their views: "[Du Bois] is a racialist whose discovery of Marxism as a critical instrument has been too recent and sudden for it to discipline his mental processes or basically to change his social outlook" (quoted in Singh, Black Is a Country, 79). E. Franklin Frazier argued “the  status of the Negro is losing its purely racial character and becoming tied up with the struggle of white and Black workers against the white land- lords and capitalists" (quoted in Black Is a Country, 81). Black socialist George Streator was unsparing: defense of “Negro racialism” was “reac- tionary," obscuring the fact that "the Negro is nine-tenths a laborer" (quoted in Black Is a Country, 80). Du Bois was unyielding: "So long as we are fighting a color-line, we must strive by color organization.” “Science alone could not settle this matter;" nor would the "color bar ... be broken by a series of brilliant, immediate assaults.” Rather, a “long siege was indicated,” with “organiza- tion in boycott, propaganda and mob frenzy,” alongside “careful planning and subtle campaign with the education of coming generations” (quoted in Black Is a Country, 64). Independent Black political activity, in this view, was intrinsically valuable and as important as labor organization. “[We] thought it was, the day of Internationalism, Humanity and the disappear- ance of ‘race' from our vocabulary,” Du Bois admitted (quoted in Black Is a Country, 64). But he was skeptical Black incorporation into working- class politics would eliminate racial antagonism as a dimension of national life and international relations and saw movements of the racially excluded as the cutting edge of democratic politics: a means to reorganizing the state, through legal reform and normative influence. These debates at the onset of the long civil rights movement and the birth of the Keynesian welfare state seem distant, but they illuminate puzzles that have been central to the problematic of racial capitalism going forward. Robinson aligns with Du Bois, emphasizing the precedence of racial ordering as an inheritance of European feudalism presaging the rise of capitalism in the English countryside in the sixteenth century. "Capitalism was less a catastrophic revolution (negation) of feudalist social orders than the extension of these social relations into the larger tapestry of the modern world's political and economic relationships," Robinson writes. “[F]rom its very beginnings, European civilization was con- structed on antagonistic differences." The conquests and uneven development of European peoples, exemplified by the colonization of Ireland, seeded the “uneven development of national capitalisms” and secreted racialism as “an enduring principle of European social order" and its settler colonial offshoots (Black Marxism, 29). "The universality of capitalism is less an historical reality, than the construct of this language of error," Robinson concludes (20). The "error" has led to consequential erasures, but also, it should be added, to stabiliz- ing reforms, in which overcoming capitalism's particularistic, violent precedents, and ascriptive hierarchies associated with them, became a means by which bourgeois discourse represented capitalism's historical progress and purported moral development. Focusing on demystifying this ideological procedure, Western Marxists have tended to redouble the progressive error by emphasizing economically determined stages of history and derogating democratic rights and struggles. What Robinson calls Black Marxism, by contrast, pursues a recursive, iterative path, delineating persistent (racial/national) exclusions of Western emancipatory discourses, while at the same time laying claim to an insurgent universality deriving from a stubborn resistance and failure to incorporate Black life into legal and normative capitalist circuitries of wage and contract. James's and Du Bois's respective histories of slave emancipation in Haiti during the French Revolution, and in the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction, exemplify this approach. Strikingly convergent accounts, The Black Jacobins (1938) and Black Reconstruction in America (1935), emphasize ongoing racial subordination in the alliance of emanci- pation and capital, one that laid bare what Du Bois called "the real modern labor problem" throughout the world: the “industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers in Africa and Asia... despised and rejected by race and color; paid a wage below the level of decent living; driven, beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but name" (Black Reconstruction, 632–634). In turn, both works highlight what might be called the radical democratic dimensions of independent Black struggle that were manifested in the subaltern revolutionary consciousness and actions of slaves that radicalized emancipatory decrees from on high, not least because they were denied what Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of racial and colonial deference, and that he suggested had effectively bought the acquiescence of white labor (700).

Last summer we saw one of the largest anti-racist mobilisations in decades. In over sixty countries, protesters took to the streets in their thousands to demand transformative, lasting change. The Black Lives Matter movement calls for a fundamental shift in how our societies are organised: defunding police forces, ending the prison-industrial complex, opposing imperialist projects abroad, and destroying neo-colonial power relations between the Global North and the Global South. Racism and its brutal history are being discussed in a way that is unparalleled in my lifetime. As happens with every radical movement, the political establishment responded with both condemnation and co-option. Some, like our government, have been eager to dismiss this historic mobilisation and suppress its demands. Other elements of the ruling class opted to misrepresent and appropriate those demands. In Britain, where Black Lives Matter protests took place in over 150 locations across the country, Boris Johnson claimed that ending the glorification of colonialists and slave traders constituted ‘lying about our history’ — as if racist mass murder, dispossession, and exploitation were fitting subjects to be glorified. The liberal centre has not fared much better. Brands that were quick to post Instagram stories insisting that ‘Black Lives Matter’ have since seen allegations of selling clothes made by Asian women exploited in UK sweatshops. Their shallow attempts to co-opt the movement with promises of ‘awareness raising’, ‘unconscious bias training’, and ‘diversity hires’ fell flat. The people who took to the streets know that tweaking the system isn’t enough. The truth is, George Floyd’s brutal murder and racist policing is the sharp end of endemic racism that exists within both the USA and the UK. This racism isn’t incidental. It’s central to capitalism — both its history and in the present day. Racism in society isn’t a glitch, it’s a feature. It’s functional to the key driver of our economic system: the accumulation of capital. This, rather than meeting human need, is fundamental to capitalism. And it is why racism is embedded in its social relations. The wealth that enriched the British Empire and established it as a global superpower meant the murder, destruction, and brutalisation of people across the world. Millions died and civilisations were destroyed. The perpetrators of these crimes had to believe that what they were doing was justified. This justification was supplied by an ideology that said Britain, Europe and whiteness were superior. This found expression in figures such as white supremacist and colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who in 1877 said that ‘we [white Englishmen] are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human right.’ But it wasn’t only arch-conservatives advocating this ideology — similar sentiments were echoed by the nineteenth-century philosopher and liberal hero John Stuart Mill. India, Mill said, was made up of ‘barbarous people’, ‘not fit to govern itself’ and so Britain was justified in colonising the subcontinent. He argued this shortly after working for the East India Company, a private company effectively acting as an extension of the British state, responsible for extracting billions of pounds of resources from the country. The propagation of racist ideology was always closely tied to colonial expansion. This ideology hasn’t disappeared. The racist narrative set by the War on Terror casts Muslims as a security threat, in need of discipline, subordination, or suppression. This Islamophobia was the background to the Western imperial war against Iraq, with false links drawn between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks and trumped-up evidence testifying to Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Not mentioned in pro-war arguments was Iraq’s unwillingness to open its vast oil fields to Western companies, but of course when the US toppled Saddam those oil reserves were privatised and sold off. But racism doesn’t just serve capital accumulation and dispossession at the empire’s periphery. It is key to shaping conditions here in the metropole as well. Britain has just entered the worst recession on record. We’re set to experience an unprecedented jobs crisis and unemployment levels not seen in decades, and we have the highest coronavirus death rate in Europe. Responsibility for this lies squarely with the Conservative government, yet for weeks we saw a ‘migrant crisis’ dominate the news. The home secretary even threatened to deploy military vessels in the Channel to deter desperate people in dinghies. Fear of these ‘invaders’ was whipped up by a compliant media even as we learned of the death of Abdulfatah Hamdallah, a refugee from Sudan, making the crossing. This is no coincidence. The Conservatives and their billionaire press allies stir up hatred and fear in order to divide and rule. They use racism to project structural problems onto minority groups, to distract from social crises by demonising vulnerable people, and to make exploitation easier and more palatable. This isn’t unique to any one form of racism. It’s true of them all. While “gang violence” is racialised as black and is used to justify increased police powers and brutality against black communities, antisemitism is used to blame structural problems on a persecuted minority. It portrays Jewish people as conspiring behind the scenes, imagining that an ‘alien’ presence is the cause of social ills rather than structures of oppression and domination. This is what is happening when antisemites spread conspiracies about the Rothschilds and George Soros. Far from being radical, this ‘socialism of fools’ is another reactionary ideology that scapegoats a vulnerable minority. So while different racisms may appear distinct, they serve the same function: portraying the integral problems inherent in the system as separate and isolated from it. This is true whether it is Conservative MPs warning of ‘invading migrants’, Muslim communities being blamed for coronavirus, black youths depicted as criminal gangsters, or the Telegraph printing Soros conspiracies on its frontpage. And this is why all minorities have a shared interest in defeating racism, whatever form it takes. So long as this kind of reactionary thinking exists, none of us are safe from denigration and attack. It’s also why the most powerful answers to racism are radical. It’s easy to spout platitudes about being anti-racist, but only a socialist analysis explains a system that breeds racism. This analysis tells us that alienation, exploitation, and falling living standards aren’t the fault of any religious or ethnic group, they are the nature of capitalism itself — which is built upon minority rule by the super-rich. A socialist analysis doesn’t just get to the root of social ills, it also shows us the route to liberation. It reveals that our struggles are linked. My liberation as a Muslim woman is tied to your liberation as a Jewish person and her liberation as a black woman. We’re brought together through shared oppression, united with the global working class. We each have a stake in fighting for the other. Our opponents seek to divide us, to make us feel alone and without hope. That’s how they win. In the post-Covid world, they will do this with more venom than ever. But we win when we build bonds of solidarity and when we link our struggles. There is an old socialist slogan, ‘workers of the world, unite!’ It’s not a relic from history, it’s an injunction for today. It calls us to an internationalist approach to socialism, one which can truly tackle racism at its core. It’s a vision worth fighting for.

Christian Smalls, a key organizer and president of the historic Amazon Labor Union, has dubbed summer 2022 #hotlaborsummer. In doing so he has helped bring attention to the massive unionizing campaigns and labor struggles raging throughout the nation. Since October 2021 petitions to the National Labor Relations Board for union representation have increased 57 percent. Meanwhile, general approval for union efforts in the United States has reached 68 percent, the highest it’s been since 1965. Workers at corporate behemoths—including Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, and Google—are banding together to wrest better benefits, wages, and working conditions from their employers as inflation reaches levels not seen in forty years and material conditions continue to deteriorate. Black communist women have long served as a vital, albeit overlooked, source of hope and inspiration in challenging times. This assertion of worker power stretches beyond the United States: Panamanian workers took to the streets starting on July 1, 2022 to protest rising costs of living and a growing economic crisis. That same month in Paris, strikes led by airline workers grounded a significant number of flights. For the past several months, strikes and labor unrest have spread throughout the African continent, including in Tunisia, South Africa, Ghana, and Eswatini. In the summer of 2022, strikes also repeatedly halted rail transportation in the United Kingdom, where Mick Lynch, head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, has called for a general strike in response to the ruling Conservative Party’s failure to keep wages in line with inflation. While these demands are contextually specific, workers around the world are rising up against deteriorating living and working conditions as a tiny minority reaps historic profits. The exciting resurgence of labor notwithstanding, #hotlaborsummer might more aptly be understood as #classwarsummer, as the ruling class is not sitting idly by as workers assert their labor power. U.S. corporations have illegally retaliated by shutting down stores where union activities have taken place and engaged in draconian anti-union efforts. Elsewhere governments have violently cracked down on labor protests, intimidating, jailing, and killing hundreds. The current dialectic between labor radicalism and ruling class repression, happening in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, proto-fascisms rising throughout the world, and leftist fightback—from the election of the first-ever leftwing government in Colombia to the reinvigoration of global anti-imperialist solidarity—repeats patterns of struggle familiar to twentieth century organizers. As appeals to better working conditions once again gain broader popularity, it serves us well to engage with past labor struggles, movements, and leaders. In particular, Black communist women have long served as a vital, albeit overlooked, source of hope and inspiration in challenging times. We do well to learn from their writing and work as anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist organizers and, of course, to say their names: Grace Campbell, Williana Burroughs, Maude White, Thyra Edwards, Ella Baker, Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale, Claudia Jones, Vicki Garvin, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Dorothy Hunton, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Dorothy Burnham, Yvonne Gregory, and Charlotta Bass. As founders and leaders of unions, parties, and militant organizations—such as the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), the Trade Union Unity League, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and many others—these women offer powerful guidance in a time when deep polarization makes many despair. Yet possibilities for substantial change are cause for optimism. Under conditions of economic depression, war, and intense state repression, these women worked to build unity among the oppressed, confident that they could win. At the founding convention of the National Negro Labor Council on October 27 and 28, 1951, Black communist women received emphatic applause as they asserted their importance in the labor movement. They emphasized that as long as Black women were locked out of significant sections of U.S. industry, reduced to domestic service, and marginalized in or excluded from unions, the labor struggle as a whole would suffer. The refusal to fight against the abuse of domestic workers and to organize this section of oppressed laborers rendered the union movement incomplete at best. Women such as Helen Lunelly and Viola Brown pointed out that a key struggle of the Labor Council was to open the doors of factories and industry to Black women while simultaneously struggling for livable working conditions and wages for domestics. By offering this powerful critique, Black communist women redefined who counted as a worker, shed light on the intersections of oppression and exploitation that needed to be addressed by the labor movement, and presented the necessary actions for launching a truly representative labor struggle. The Communist Party established itself among Black people as a leader in the struggle against Jim Crow, lynching, and white supremacy. This analysis did not originate after World War II. At the first meeting of the National Negro Congress (NNC) from February 14–18, 1936, Black communist women helped to shape a resolution for a national movement. Under the direction of the NNC, the resolution would organize domestic workers—85 percent of whom were Black women—to regularize their hours, raise their wages, and improve their living conditions. Such a movement would elevate the conditions not only of Black workers, but of all working people. It was out of this meeting that Louise Thompson Patterson wrote her pivotal 1936 article “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” in which she laid out how Black women in the Northern “slave markets” and on Southern farms were “severely exploited” as workers, as women, and as “Negroes.” This superexploitation was exacerbated by Black women’s high rate of unemployment, discrimination in relief programs, exorbitant rents, and terrible housing, all of which they endured while maintaining and rearing their families. Black women’s plight was not only the plight of the Black community; it was the plight of all workers struggling against the intensification of subjection in the throes of the Great Depression. This astute analysis of the structural and material conditions of Black women was articulated even earlier by Grace Campbell, one of the first women to join the CPUSA. Campbell was ahead of her time in using the realities of Black women workers to illuminate the importance of simultaneously struggling against both capitalism and racism to shore up interracial worker unity. Black communist women understood that satisfying the material needs of the most exploited group would strengthen the labor movement and its ability to fight against class domination and its intensification by imperialism, war, racism, and fascism. This was not least because, as Claudia Jones put it, Black women were the “real active forces—the organizers and the workers” in the institutions and organizations that were central to the economic, political, and social life of Black people, and addressing their special oppressed status would help to bring their militant energy to even greater heights in the fight for peace and socialism. Black women in and around the CPUSA saw the party as an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which oversaw Jim Crow segregation and facilitated the rise of monopoly-finance capitalism. For several decades in the early- to mid-twentieth-century United States, Black communist women organized, fought, and led mass campaigns against national oppression and economic exploitation. Within and alongside the CPUSA, they highlighted the conditions facing Black women workers, placed the abolition of white supremacy at the center of the class struggle, and viewed the achievement of socialism as necessary for full social and economic equality. Racism in domestic, agricultural, and industrial labor demonstrated the necessity of unionizing all workers, with a special consideration for those who bore the brunt of racism and capitalism—Black communist women’s experiences as organizers taught them how challenging this task is. From their analyses of the economic bases of racism, Black communist women also generated a compelling theorization of fascism, contending that capitalists hold on to power via white supremacy, militarism, sexism, and imperialism. Engaged in international struggles against fascism and colonialism, they built new organizations and created an international movement for peace. Yet their work forging the CPUSA and envisioning an international socialism dedicated to Black liberation—and a Black liberation dedicated to socialism—has been largely excluded from popular visions of twentieth-century radical left politics. This “intellectual McCarthyism,” erasing and suppressing the contributions of these theorist-organizers, distorts our understanding of organized radical politics. Acknowledging the role these women played expands our understanding of radical left movements’ history and future. Seeing the Patterns, Fighting the System A deep sense of the patterns of oppression and resistance guided Black communist women’s activism. Specific issues—for example, the campaign around the “Scottsboro boys,” nine Black youth who were wrongfully convicted of raping two white women in a freight train boxcar in Alabama in 1931—served as a catalyst for bringing more people into organized struggle. Through its militant defense of these young men, the Communist Party established itself among Black people as a leader in the struggle against Jim Crow, lynching, and white supremacy. Attention to this specific crime exposed a general, structural injustice. The Scottsboro boys crusade brought national and international attention to the white supremacist violence and economic deprivation of the Jim Crow South. It also brought more Black people into the party, building their capacities for ongoing political work. Black communist women also highlighted similarities between the situation of Black people in the “Black Belt” of the southern United States and in Ethiopia when that country was invaded by Italy under Benito Mussolini in 1935. In each instance, defending the safety and freedom of Black people was necessary for the defeat of fascism—and neither the U.S. government nor the League of Nations found Black lives worth defending. Black working-class women’s social and economic position primed them for organizing; they were an intensely exploited and intensely militant segment of the labor force. Black communist women’s political writing can teach contemporary organizers practical and theoretical lessons. Practical lessons include going directly to the people to learn about their experiences, creating opportunities for people to speak and advocate for themselves, and using organizations to amplify power. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of New Negro militancy, Black women in and around the CPUSA saw the party as an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which oversaw Jim Crow segregation, overlooked lynching and racist violence, and facilitated the rise of monopoly-finance capitalism. Theoretical lessons recognize capitalism’s centrality to white supremacy and oppression, and the imperative of unity in the struggle for liberation while also acknowledging the special nature of anti-Black oppression. Black communist women in the first half of the twentieth century foregrounded how capitalism incites racism and sexism to fragment workers and maintain class power—and how the participation of the working class in these forms of discrimination undermines worker unity. Shedding light on Black women’s experiences as racialized and sexualized workers, Black communist women’s political writing avoids identity reductionism—the assumption that a particular confluence of identities renders one more oppressed or inherently radical. Rather, their speeches and articles highlight the experiences of Black workers, analyze their patterns of exploitation and oppression, and propose strategies for organization and agitation based on these analyses, all with the goal of building collective power capable of winning the struggle for liberation. Communists Against White Supremacy and Fascism Anti-communism in the United States has long been tied to anti-foreignness and white supremacy. In the First Red Scare of 1919, fears of anarchism—stemming from anarchist bombings and anxieties about Bolshevism, as well as rising labor militancy and the Seattle General Strike—combined with the nationalism, anti-Germanism, and anti-immigrant sentiment of World War I. Unwarranted arrests and illegal search and seizures led to the deportation of hundreds of noncitizens. This anti-radicalism also manifested in the related “Black Scare,” in which savage white mobs harassed Black soldiers returning home from the war and Black workers occupying “white” jobs in industrial centers. During that violent Red Summer of 1919, Black people resisted white terror, fighting back against race rioters and lynchers. Instead of acknowledging justified Black outrage, white newspapers blamed the Bolsheviks and “outside agitators” for inciting revolt. Anti-communism in the United States has long been tied to anti-foreignness and white supremacy. In the following decades, the U.S. State Department consistently depicted Black internationalists as subversives and enemies of the state who were prone to foreign inspiration. They presented Black resistance not as the logical response to lynch law but as a manifestation of Black disloyalty. The McCarthy era unleashed a fear of communism. During this Second Red Scare, state repression damaged the lives of thousands of people. Communists were arrested, imprisoned, and deported. Anti-communism knit together and intensified anti-Blackness and anti-foreignness and was used to justify the violent repression of Black political leaders. Because anti-colonialism, the peace movement, and desegregation were construed as dangerously un-American, leaders of the Black liberation movement came under attack. Communism—because of its mobilization for economic redistribution, racial equality, and Black-white labor solidarity—was presented as antithetical to legitimate political struggle, rendered as totalitarian, antidemocratic, and criminal. Anything that could be construed as even potentially communist, not least Black militancy, became akin to sedition. Anti-communism is a key plank of white supremacy, as it binds democracy with liberal capitalism and white class rule while also rendering Black struggle a threat to the “American way of life.” These tropes are alive and well today: from the liberal and right-wing attacks on “wokeism” to the far-right scapegoating of “cultural Marxism” and “Critical Race Theory.” Anti-communism persists by associating Black radical struggle with criminality, destruction, outside agitation, and subversion.

In the wake of the 2016 election, public intellectuals latched onto the new administration’s organic and ideological links with the alt- and far right. But a mass civic insurgency against racial terror—and the federal government’s authoritarian response—has pushed hitherto cloistered academic debates about fascism into the mainstream, with Peter E. Gordon, Samuel Moyn, and Sarah Churchwell taking to the pages of the New York Review of Books to hash out whether it is historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist. The F-word has also been making unusual forays into CNN, the New York Times, and mainstream discourse. The increasing prospect that any transfer of power will be fraught—Trump has hinted he will not accept the results if he loses—has further intensified the stakes, with even the dependable neoliberal cheerleader Thomas Friedman conjuring up specters of civil war. Notwithstanding the changing terrain, talk of fascism has generally stuck to the same groove, asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships. Sceptics of comparison underscore the way that the analogy of fascism can either treat the present moment as exceptional, papering over the history of distinctly American forms of authoritarianism, or be so broad as to fail to define what is unique about our current predicament. Analogy’s advocates point to the need to detect family resemblances with past despotisms before it’s too late, often making their case by advancing some ideal-typical checklist, whether in terms of the elements of or the steps toward fascism. But what if our talk of fascism were not dominated by the question of analogy? Attending to the long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance—to what Cedric Robinson called a “Black construction of fascism” alternative to the “historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist”—could serve to dislodge the debate about fascism from the deadlock of analogy, providing the resources to confront our volatile interregnum. Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery. Pan-Africanist George Padmore, breaking with the Communist International over its failure to see the likenesses between “democratic” imperialism and fascism, would write in How Britain Rules Africa (1936) of settler-colonial racism as “the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today.” He would go on to see in South Africa “the world’s classic Fascist state,” grounded on the “unity of race as against class.” Padmore’s “Colonial Fascism” thus anticipated Aimé Césaire’s memorable description of fascism as the boomerang effect of European imperialist violence. African American anti-fascists shared the anti-colonial analysis that the Atlantic world’s history of racial violence belied the novelty of intra-European fascism. Speaking in Paris at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, Langston Hughes declared: “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” It was an insight that certainly would not have surprised any reader of W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental reckoning with the history of U.S. racial capitalism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). As Amiri Baraka would suggest much later, building on Du Bois’s passing mentions of fascism, the overthrow of Reconstruction enacted a “racial fascism” that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, conscription of poor whites, and manipulation of (to quote the famous definition of fascism by Georgi Dimitrov) “the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist sector of finance capital.” In this view, a U.S. racial fascism could go unremarked because it operated on the other side of the color line, just as colonial fascism took place far from the imperial metropole. As Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials have suggested in their vital The US Antifascism Reader (2020): For people of color at various historical moments, the experience of racialization within a liberal democracy could have the valence of fascism. That is to say, while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience. For those racially cast aside outside of liberal democracy’s system of rights, the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order. Or, as French writer Jean Genet observed on May 1, 1970, at a rally in New Haven for the liberation of Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale: “Another thing worries me: fascism. We often hear the Black Panther Party speak of fascism, and whites have difficulty accepting the word. That’s because whites have to make a great effort of imagination to understand that blacks live under an oppressive fascist regime.” It was largely thanks to the Panthers that the term “fascism” returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland in 1969 brought together a wide swathe of the Old and New Lefts, as well as Asian American, Chicano, Puerto Rican (Young Lords), and white Appalachian (Young Patriots Organization) activists who had developed their own perspectives on U.S. fascism—for instance, by foregrounding the experience of Japanese internment during World War II. In a striking indication of the peculiarities and continuities of U.S. anti-fascist traditions, among the chief planks of the conference was the notionally reformist demand for community or decentralized policing—to remove racist white officers from Black neighborhoods and exert local checks on law enforcement. Political prisoners close to the Panthers theorized specifically about what we could call “late fascism” (by analogy with “late capitalism”) in the United States. At the same time that debates about “new fascisms” were polarizing radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson generated a theory of fascism from the lived experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism. Davis, the Black Marxist and feminist scholar, needs little introduction, her 1970 imprisonment on trumped-up conspiracy charges having rocketed her to the status of household name in the United States and an icon of solidarity worldwide. Fewer remember that the conspiracy charge against Davis arose from an armed courtroom attack by her seventeen-year-old bodyguard, Jonathan Jackson, with the goal of forcing the release of the Soledad Brothers, three African American prisoners facing the death penalty for the killing of a white prison guard. Among them was Jonathan’s older brother, the incarcerated Black revolutionary George Jackson, with whom Davis corresponded extensively. Jackson was killed by a prison sniper during an escape attempt on August, 21, 1971, a few days before the Soledad Brothers were to be tried. When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.Jackson encourages us to consider what happens to our conceptions of fascism if we take our bearings not from analogies with the European interwar scene, but instead from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the “concrete and steel,” from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression. In their writing and correspondence, marked by interpretive differences alongside profound comradeship, Davis and Jackson identify the U.S. state as the site for a recombinant or even consummate form of fascism. Much of their writing is threaded through Marxist debates on the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and capitalist crises, as well as, in Jackson’s case, an effort to revisit the classical historiography on fascism. On these grounds, Jackson and Davis stress the disanalogies between present forms of domination and European exemplars, but both assert the privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a prison-judicial system that could accurately be described as a racial state of terror. This both echoes and departs from the Black radical theories of fascism, such as Padmore’s or Césaire’s, which emerged from the experience of the colonized. The new, U.S. fascism that Jackson and Davis strive to delineate is not an unwanted return from the “other scene” of colonial violence, but originates from liberal democracy itself. Indeed, it was a sense of the disavowed bonds between liberal and fascist forms of the state which, for Davis, was one of the great lessons passed on by Herbert Marcuse, whose grasp of this nexus in 1930s Germany allowed him to discern the fascist tendencies in the United States of his exile. Both Davis and Jackson also stress the necessity to grasp fascism not as a static form but as a process, inflected by its political and economic contexts and conjunctures. Checklists, analogies, or ideal-types cannot do justice to the concrete history of fascism. Jackson writes of “the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.” He remarks that fascism “developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation.” Where Jackson and Davis echo their European counterparts is in the idea that “new” fascisms cannot be understood without seeing them as responses to the insurgencies of the 1960s and early 1970s. For Jackson, fascism is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary form, as evidenced by the violence with which it represses any consequential threat to the state. But fascism does not react immediately against an ascendant revolutionary force; it is a kind of delayed counterrevolution, parasitic on the weakness or defeat of the anti-capitalist left, “the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried—a consciousness that was compromised.” Jackson argues that U.S.-style fascism is a kind of perfected form—all the more insidiously hegemonic because of the marriage of monopoly capital with the (racialized) trappings of liberal democracy. As he declared: Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange. In Davis’s concurrent theorizing, the carceral, liberationist perspective on fascism has a different inflection. For Davis, fascism in the United States takes a preventive and incipient form. The terminology is adapted from Marcuse, who remarked, in an interview from 1970, “In the last ten to twenty years we’ve experienced a preventative counterrevolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn’t stand on the agenda at the moment.” Some of the elements of Marcuse’s analysis still resonate (particularly poignant, in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder by police, is his mention of no-knock warrants): Davis was drawn to Marcuse’s contention that “fascism is the preventive counter-revolution to the socialist transformation of society” because of how it resonated with racialized communities and activists. In the experience of many Black radicals, the aspect of their revolutionary politics that most threatened the state was not the endorsement of armed struggle, but rather the “survival programs,” those enclaves of autonomous social reproduction facilitated by the Panthers and more broadly practiced by Black movements. While nominally mobilized against the threat of armed insurrection, the ultimate target of counterinsurgency were these experiments with social life outside and against the racial state—especially when they edged toward what Huey P. Newton named “revolutionary intercommunalism.” What can be gleaned from Davis’s account is the way that fascism and democracy can be experienced very differently by different segments of the population. In this regard, Davis is attuned to the ways in which race and gender, alongside class, can determine how fascist the country seems to any given individual. As Davis puts it, fascism is “primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even moderate democrats.” But the latter are unlikely to fully perceive this phenomenon because of the manufactured invisibility of the site of the state’s maximally fascist presentation, namely, prisons with their “totalitarian aspirations.”

In the Black Atlantic diaspora Black women’s bodies are always already marked as ugly, especially if dark skinned. This is a North Atlantic universal (Truillot 1995) which travelled around the routes of racial capitalism-settler colonialism, empire and enslavement - and still resonates in the diaspora today. In the Global Northwest the construction of dark African-descent skin as antithetical to whiteness and ugly already existed in the Middle Ages which supports Robinson’s (1983) claim that race thinking began within Europe itself. Religious scholar, Peter Abelard (1119-1142), wrote to Hèlöise about the Song of Songs and the Queen of Sheba being desired by and sexually intimate with King Solomon, “it so happens that the skin of black women, less agreeable to the gaze, is softer to touch and the pleasures one derives from their love are more delicious and delightful” (Sharpley-Whiting 1999, 1). Black women’s skin, although softer, was already constructed as ugly in the Middle Ages, whilst paradoxically, they were seen as offering intense sexual pleasure. Skin and hyper-sexuality already marked Sheba and, therefore, all Black women as racialized “others”, desirable but contemptible. Constructing the gendered and “raced” boundaries of European national identities and white supremacy continued with early European travel writers who represented African women as monstrous bodies, “desirable and repulsive, available and untouchable, productive and reproductive, beautiful and Black” (Morgan in Hall 2000, 39). These discourses emerged centuries before the European colonies in North and Latin America and the Caribbean were established (Gilman 1992). Skin shades and dark African-descent skin have had resonance within the Black Atlantic world for centuries. For example, in El Archivo de Indias in Seville it is possible to see requests for licences to travel to Latin America from Spanish families which list household members, both free and enslaved, in terms of the constructed caste-shade categories generated from “race mixing” and blood quantum, for example, mulata/o, zambo, morisco. In the Mexican Las Castas classification mulata/o had white and Black parents, morisco had mulata/o and white parents and zambo had Indigenous and Black parents. Needless to say each blood quantum category had different discursive constructions attributed to skin and through that to people, which enabled Spanish whiteness to have boundaries setting it apart from those who were “mixed race”, Black or Indigenous. According to Hilary Beckles (1999), during enslavement in the Caribbean the Black woman was ideologically constructed as essentially “nonfeminine” in so far as primacy was placed upon her alleged muscular capabilities, physical strength, aggressive carriage, and sturdiness (10). Proslavery writers presented her as devoid of the feminine tenderness and graciousness in which the white woman was tightly wrapped. The history of the Black woman’s body in the European-North/Latin American imagination is imbricated within racial capitalism, its racialization regimes and technologies of governance based on skin shade further developed during Western Hemispheric colonialism and enslavement. These regimes and technologies still remain active today both in metropoles and former/present colonies. Indeed, for Hortense Spillers (1987) the Black woman’s body has provided and continues to provide an essential other for the construction of white US American/European women’s bodies. The dark skinned Black woman continues to be a marginalized corporeality in white and light skinned US-UK/ European-Latin American-Caribbean cultural consciousness and representation. Drawing on the earlier work of Charles Parrish, Jeffrianne Wilder (2010) asserts that there has been no change in colourist ideology among African Americans. The attitudes and names associated with light skin tones tended to be negative whilst those related to dark skin tones were derogatory, but medium skin tones were viewed most positively. For Wilder (2010), colourism in the USA seemed not to operate in the traditional binary logic of racialized skin politics but was within a three-tier system with brown at the top of the hierarchy. This preference for brownness and orientation away from dark skin also maps onto Jamaica’s “browning” (Mohammed 2000; Tate 2009), Brazil’s “mulata” (Caldwell 2007; Pinho 2010), Cuba’s “mulata” (Arrizon 2006) and the Dominican Republic’s denial of African descent but embrace of indigeneity and Spanish descent brownness (Candelario 2000). In the Global North/South West, dark skin colour continues to speak racialized otherness and ugliness in post-settler, post-plantation and post-colonial societies. Indeed, it is through skin shade that we still intuit who can be human even in those societies which appear to be racially homogeneous (Pierre 2013; Tate 2016; Wynter 2003, 2001). As Kobena Mercer (1994) reminded us, skin is not just organic but highly politicized as a hyper-visible signifier of racial difference. Our racialized and gendered identifications emerge in the flow between skin shades as meaning-filled and affective body surfacings. Skin shade continues to be the building block of national politics, aesthetic hierarchies, transracial intimacies/ dislocations and structural inequality within the USA, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and the African continent (Pierre 2013; 2008; Fokuo 2009; Hope 2009; Brown-Glaude 2007; Tate 2016). It is from within the historical and contemporary aesthetic matrix of racial capitalism that we see discourses of dark skin on women’s bodies as ugly, backward, masculine, desirable, repulsive, and contemptible, spreading out as a “second skin” (Cheng 2011) to impact Black women through misogynoir.

Through this comparison between Obama and Trump, we see the same naked racism as the attention to her arms because she is known only through a “second skin” which places her as (un)knowable threat to the white body politic socially, politically, culturally, aesthetically, and psychically. This “second skin” is always already known within the Global North and South West racial epidermal schema in which irrespective of gender, class, age, ability or sexuality, black bodies are “sprawled out, distorted, recoloured animalistic, bad, mean, ugly, cannibalistic, lascivious but, most importantly, feared” (Fanon 1986, 113). Overdetermined by “this second skin”, Obama had to performatively enact a “known” bodily hexis as FLOTUS through “civility” as in colonial times. This civility was measured through how her body spoke, looked, behaved, and was adorned. She had to use glamour and professionalism to undermine the threat posed by her dark skin to the body politic imagined as white and male. We can see this assumed threat in the focus on her arms, muscles covered by her dark skin themselves covered by the “second skin”, where we can perceive fear, contempt and white ontological insecurity even as “the force of the racist episteme is imprinted on the body” (Puwar 2004, 41). As Charles Mills (1997) argues, the white body continues to be the somatic norm even if it is no longer juridically or constitutionally supported because the racial contract demarcates and reserves space for its white first-class citizens. Thus, reactions to Obama show the connectedness between anti-dark skin aesthetics and negative affect within racial capitalism. Dark skin is also affective outside of the White House space as we see next in a Teen Vogue article on Nyakim Gatwech. South Sudanese model Nyakim Gatwech, called ‘Queen of the Dark’, has taken the world by storm simply because she celebrates and loves her darker skin (Sahu 2017). Nyakim went viral after posting a story of her interaction with an Uber driver on Instagram. When the Uber driver asked if she would bleach her skin for $10,000, 181 https://sta.uwi.edu/crgs/index.asp UWI IGDS CRGS Issue 13 ISSN 1995-1108 Nyakim laughed it off. ‘I would never do that. I consider my skin to be a blessing’”, she told him (Roberts 2017) To “take the world by storm” because you celebrate and love the dark skin you live in, means that dark skin continues to be seen as problematic by “the world” and dark skin on African-descent women’s bodies is something that still attracts negative affect. We see this in the article which makes us assume that she should hate rather than love her dark skin as well as not celebrate it. Thus, selfhate and its binary self-love need to be looked at briefly here. According to Peter Hadreas (2016), personal love is looking together in the same direction and personal love wears down inequalities. If we take the back of the cab as a microcosm of the world in which she lives, Gatwech cannot look in the same direction as the taxi driver because to do that would be to reproduce herself as unequal and as ugly. To do that would be to reiterate that very hatred of dark skin which generalizes and constructs her through “an exclusive or” (Hadreas 2106, 2). The generalization is the assumption that she must hate her skin enough to want to change it, and the exclusive or is that she is both a fare and contemptible. The world she inhabits in the back of the cab is one in which a “limiting case of hatred emerges when groups of people are believed to be monolithically necessarily worthy of harm and blame” (Hadreas 2016, 2). That is a world dominated by white supremacy and shadism which together produce the iconic norms of whiteness and lightness as skin ideals and reproduce dark skin as ugly. Gatwech turns away from this world towards love of dark skin, towards self-love without reliance on the other to come into being. In contradistinction to the world of darker skin hatred she sees her skin as a blessing and would not bleach it even if offered a considerable sum of money. She negates the ruling episteme within racial capitalism where whiteness/ lightness is prized and brownness is desired, even whilst she undertakes global aesthetic labour as a model within it. She has “caused a storm” because she transgresses a racial aesthetic contract in the Global North/South West which has been centuries in the making and which is so pervasive that it has almost 182 Shirley Anne Tate: The Dark Skin I Live In: Decolonizing Racial Capitalism’s Aesthetic Hierarchies in the Diaspora managed to disappear into thin air because its negativity is a taken-for-granted aspect of social life. It is something that we are all inculcated to expect within a Global North/South West aesthetic “libidinal economy” which, for Frank Wilderson, functions variously across scales and is as ‘objective’ as political economy. It is linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction and the violence of lethal consumption… it is the whole structure of psychic and emotional life… something more than but inclusive of or traversed by … a ‘structure of feeling’; it is a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, phobias capable of great mobility and tenacious fixation (7).

First, the colonization of the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade established the material and ideological foundations of capitalism – a system based on extraction, accumulation through dispossession, and White supremacy.49 The Anthropocene is the epoch under which ‘humanity’ – but more accurately, petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism – have had such a large impact on the planet that radionuclides, coal, plutonium, plastic, concrete, genocide and other markers are now visible in the geologic strata.50 Indeed, the genocide of the Indigenous populations of the Americas in the 1500s was so massive (nearly fifty million deaths) that farming collapsed and forests rebounded.51 The removal by forests of enormous amounts of carbon from the atmosphere caused a significant dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in the 1600s, measurable in Antarctic ice cores.52 Due to the magnitude of this early human modification of the environment, some scholars have proposed 1610 as the beginning of the Anthropocene.53 This early marker of the Anthropocene coincided with the importation of enslaved Africans to extract gold, silver, and copper in the Americas and to produce the sugar and cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution.54 “Plantation agriculture and cotton in particular were key to the emergence of the industrial power of England first and quickly much of the rest of Europe.” 55 The slave plantation colonies of the Americas supplied not only food and industrial inputs but also markets for British manufactured goods.56 Between 1600 and 1800, slaves in the Americas comprised less than 1 percent of the world’s population, but produced the commodities that dominated world trade.57 Slavery, genocide, and colonialism were thus central rather than peripheral to the Industrial Revolution, the birth of carbon capitalism, and the beginning of the Anthropocene.58 These systems of domination relied on lethal force as well as the ideology of White supremacy.59 Second, the “slow violence” inflicted by the fossil fuel industry on racialized and poor communities throughout the world remains a central feature of contemporary capitalism.60 The extraction, processing, transportation, refining, and combustion of fossil fuels has placed disproportionate environmental burdens on racialized communities in both the Global North and the Global South. From the Niger Delta to the Canadian tar sands to the countless communities living in the shadow of polluting petrochemical facilities and power plants, the life cycle impacts of fossil fuels include eviction from ancestral lands; desecration of sacred sites; poisoning of air, land, and water; fires, explosions, and industrial accidents; loss of subsistence fishing and hunting rights; and exposure to significant health hazards.61 Thus, local and transnational environmental justice struggles against coal mining, petroleum drilling, fracking, oil and gas pipelines, and polluting refineries and power plants are an integral part of the struggle for climate justice. Third, fossil fuels are concentrated in particular countries and regions, such as the Middle East, that have been targeted over and over for invasion, occupation, and exploitation. The North’s bloody resource wars, its collusion with despotic petrostates, and the resulting death, destruction, and displacement of racialized Muslim and Arab populations are among the most violent ongoing manifestations of climate injustice.62 When persons displaced by these conflicts seek refuge in the Global North, they are branded as potential terrorists and subjected to restrictive border controls, including the notorious “Muslim ban” on travel to the USA from certain predominantly Muslim countries.63 Fourth, those most susceptible to climate-related disasters and slow-onset events are overwhelmingly persons classified as non-White.64 They reside in geographic locations (such as lowlying coastal zones, small island states, and agriculture-dependent nations) disproportionately exposed to hurricanes, floods, drought, desertification, and rising sea levels.65 In addition, they have been rendered socially and economically vulnerable to climate change by the North’s economic and military interventions.66 The North’s “under-development” of the Global South during the colonial and postcolonial era, so eloquently described by Walter Rodney67 and Eduardo Galeano68 has been exacerbated by decades of neoliberal economic reforms imposed initially by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and subsequently through regional and multilateral trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties.69 These reforms increased poverty; reduced access to healthcare, education, and other social services; undermined the development of climate-resilient urban and rural infrastructure; created mass displacement; and deprived states and communities of the resources necessary for climate adaptation and disaster response and recovery.70

2.2. Racial capitalism at the core of greener capitalism Dependency implies the expanded reproduction of racialized global relations of exploitation. The memorandum released in the early 1990 s, signed by Lawrence Summers, when he served as Chief Economist of the World Bank, only expresses the racism that has historically structured dependency relationships (Summers, 1991). In that memo, Summers defended the migration of polluting companies from the North to the countries of the South, arguing that “a given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages” (‘Furor on Memo At World Bank’, 1992). The racist tone of the statement was completed with “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that”. In this line of thought, the global south is just a source of raw materials and sink for waste for production in imperialist countries (Rice, 2009). This is the underlying basis for most of the imperialist proposals of green capitalism and GND. Pulido (2017) underlines that environmental racism is not a product of neoliberalism but is an essential part of racial capitalism. This type of racism can be understood under the idea that racialised and low-income groups “are disproportionately exposed to pollution, but it also includes biases in natural resource policy, uneven application of environmental regulations and nature excluding conventional environmentalism” (Pulido, 1996, p. 377). In the same line of thought, decolonial approaches critically expose how coloniality of power codifies racial differences between people from the core and the periphery, making the latter appear as naturally inferior, thus taking advantage of this process to plunder their labour and nature (Álvarez and Coolsaet, 2020, p. 3). In the same line of thought, the concept of territorial coloniality (Betancourt, 2021) states that social, economic, political, environmental and cultural devastation/domination/exploitation is linked to a matrix of subalternisation of people and territories in a differentiated manner. The advance of extractivism and domination over territories affects with greater force and violence the most vulnerable sectors and regions. This matrix of subalternisation has been applied not only to many people, but also to nature and its essential elements. Racial capitalism explains that racialisation, and thus racism, are at the core of capitalism's existence and not just a derivation of capitalism itself (Gill, 2021, p. 2). This is central to the super-exploitation of both labour and nature (Burden-Stelly, 2020). As Issar explains, at the core of the process of primitive accumulation are processes of racialization and violent appropriation of bodies and nature (Issar, 2021). Within neoliberalism, certain facets of capital's exploitation are enhanced or made more explicit, such as racial and gender inequality. In this stage, the destruction of nature becomes ever more present. The proposals emanating from the imperialist centres (which until not long ago were also imperial or colonial centres) reproduce a vision of the international division of labour that places populations on the frontiers of exploitation (on the peripheries), as surplus and expendable populations (). In these territories, racialized communities are “displaced not only by climate change, military interventions, and neoliberal economic policies, but also by the measures deployed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions” (González, 2020, p. 117). In fact, “many responses to climate change are, in fact, amplifying systems of discrimination, segregation, and displacement as they attempt to adapt to the climate crisis and safeguard dominant economic and socio-political structures.” (L Rice et al., 2022, p. 2). In these sacrificial zones of racialized capitalism, populations are “particularly susceptible to harm due to their classification as surplus and disposable. Racialisation justifies and naturalises violence and dispossession” (). Some are even talking of a global system of climate apartheid (). As Melamed suggests: Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups - capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires (Melamed, 2015, p. 77). At the limit, these processes of racialisation are expressed in what Leff calls the ultimate form of the class struggle: the point at which what is in question is who has the right to make use of the world to “discharge into an environment privatised the waste of life ” (Leff, 2005). Indeed, it will be the world's poor who will get the brunt of the policies to tackle climate change. The different valuation of life is reproduced within the dependent capitalist States themselves. The advancement of extractive activities is prioritised over the reproduction of life in some territories. A clear example of this is the militarisation, during 2020 and 2021, of the town of Andalgalá, in the province of Catamarca in the central region of the Argentine mountain range, in order to limit the social mobilisation unleashed in the face of the start of an open-pit mega-mining project using the pandemic and enforced isolation as an excuse. With this intervention, the State defended the interests of the transnational mining corporations, repressing and criminalising those who were fighting for life and territory. This is yet another example of how dependent states operate in racialized capitalism, given that Catamarca is one of the poorest provinces in Argentina, and government discourse has focused on the idea that the solution to the structural poverty in this region would come from mega-mining. However, after 20 years of mega-mining activity in the region,2 the province's economic wellbeing has not improved, while the region's water has been poisoned, disease rates have risen, and droughts have deepened (No a la mina, 2015). Another example of how racial capitalism operates within dependent countries is the case of the advance of extractive activities in the territories of indigenous communities in Argentina. Despite the existence of a 2006 law that declares the emergency of the native peoples, proposing a survey of the territory of indigenous communities and the prohibition of evictions, not only has this survey not been carried out, but multiple evictions have also been executed. Thus, for example, the Mapuche people in the southern provinces have been dispossessed of their ancestral territory to allow the advance of mega-mining and the oil industry through violence and criminalisation, in combination with a media campaign that seeks to construct the image of the Mapuche as terrorists. Even self-proclaimed progressive governments (such as that of Alberto Fernández, in office in Argentina since late 2019) reproduce repressive strategies in order to move forward with extractive projects that are expected to feed the inflow of dollars into the economy. Increasingly explicitly, they link the development of mining extractivism (gold or lithium, for example) to insert the local economy into the circuits of the new green capitalism (Kulfas, 2021).

The Jevons Paradox can be associated with the concept of ‘Malthusian instability’, an expression coined by Layzer (1988). Malthusian instability refers to metabolic systems which are able to reproduce themselves (all living systems). It indicates that when operating in favourable conditions, they will unavoidably surpass the carrying capacity of their environment. This entails that the resulting process of natural selection will determine a constant evolutionary stress on metabolic systems. That is, there is a natural tendency of living systems to ‘get in trouble’, and this is the mechanism that enhances their ability to adapt and become something else. At the level of the individual metabolic system, this Mathusian instability is made possible by the existence of activities that in energy terms provide a positive return. In technical jargon we can say that these activities are generating a positive feedback or an autocatalytic loop. For example, if you invest 10MJ to perform an activity and you get 100MJ in return from this activity, and then if you re-invest the 90MJ of energy profit in doing more of the same activity, then you will get a total energy return of 900MJ. It is well known that a positive feedback like this one cannot go on unchecked for a very long period of time. We can recall here the story of Zhu Yuan-Chang’s chessboard: if you put one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and keeping doubling the number each square, there would be an astronomical number of grains of rice required for one position even before the 64th square is reached. This metaphor says it all. Hypercycles, or positive autocatalytic loops, when operating without a coupled process of control (and damping), do not survive for long; they just blow up (Ulanowicz, 1986). On the other hand, positive autocatalytic loops are required to provide the required supply of energy for those activities that are useful, but that implies a net loss of energy. When researching the sustainability of the energetic metabolism of socioeconomic systems, Georgescu-Roegen introduced an analogous concept to define a typology of technology that can lead to Malthusian instability: the concept of ‘Promethean technology’ (or the viable energy technology). A technology is viable, just like a viable biological species, if and only if this technology can reproduce itself with a surplus of energy after being set up by the technology that is now in use (Georgescu-Roegen, 1978). According to this definition, the feasibility of a technology is not sufficient for defining its viability. For example, a technology for the direct use of solar energy, which implies a deficit in the overall balance of energy over its life-cycle assessment (since other types of energy coming from outside the direct use of solar technology are required for its operation), would be feasible, but not viable. According to Georgescu-Roegen, in human history we have had only three Promethean technologies: 1 husbandry (agriculture); 2 the mastery of fire; and 3 the steam engine (or more generally the mastery of internal combustion engines), coupled to fossil energy. These technologies share a common explosive characteristic: ‘with just the spark of a match we can set on fire a whole forest. This property, although not as violent, characterizes the other two Promethean recipes’ (Georgescu-Roegen, 1992). Land is the special fuel for agriculture. Fossil fuels are the special fuels for modern industry. As illustrated in Figure 5.1, due to the autocatalytic nature of Promethean technology, humans were able to get into the Malthusian instability trap quickly by depleting the special stocks of ‘fuels’ associated with these different technologies. In particular, the explosive characteristic of the petroleumbased metabolism of modern society, due to the abundant supply of high-quality oil in the past 50 years and the continuous supply of technological efficiency improvements, has been boosting the phenomena associated with the Jevons Paradox worldwide, as empirically shown in Chapter 4. The Jevons Paradox is an issue that is little known outside of a few academic circles. However, the topic has taken on a new importance in this era of high energy prices, increased environmental awareness and concern over peak oil. At present, oil is the source of energy for nearly all the products that we consume. However, if the twilight of oil, vividly described by M. Simmons (2005), is really approaching in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East, oil producers will no longer be able to supply as much as the world will need, and we should start considering an alternative energy scenario to the conventional petroleum-based one. Looking at Figure 5.1, one would expect that a quick inversion of the trends of energy consumption should take place soon, since exponential growth in the pace of consumption of resources cannot take place for a long period of time within a finite planet. Unfortunately, looking at the expected energy demand associated with economic growth (Figure 5.2), things appear to get worse in the future. In particular, developing countries in Asia are projected to have an annual growth rate of 5.4 per cent from 2004 to 2030 (Ito, 2007). According to Luft (2007), 58 per cent of China’s oil imports come from the Middle East now and this share will grow to 70 per cent by 2015. China’s concern for its growing dependence on oil imports has led to its active involvement in exploration and production in places like Kazakhstan, Russia, Venezuela, Sudan, West Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Canada. But China is not the only actor thirsty for oil in Asia; other countries, including India, are projected to be major contributors to the world’s energy demand. In fact, India and China are estimated to account for approximately 70 per cent of the energy consumption in Asia over this 30-year time period (Ito, 2007). These projections should be a concern for many people. The progressive reduction of oil reserves will force the world to turn to coal, natural gas and unconventional sources of oil such as heavy oil, shale oil, oil sands and tar sands. However, the supply of these energy sources is also limited, and the quality of many of them is much lower than that of current sources of oil. Nevertheless, while the world awaits a technological solution to the energy crisis, these alternative fossil energy sources will be consumed at an increased pace, creating an enormous amount of damage to the environment. Those alternative energy sources that do not rely on fossil energy are impractical at the moment because of their low energy return on investment (EROI) when considering their whole life-cycle assessment. In energy analysis EROI is the ratio between the quantity of energy delivered to society by an energy system and the quantity of energy used directly and indirectly in the delivery process. This index has been introduced and used in quantitative energy analysis (Cleveland et al, 1984; Hall et al, 1986; Cleveland, 1992). For example, the low EROI of nuclear power is due to the costs of mining and enriching the required fuel, building new plants and CONCLUSION 175 Figure 5.1 The major discontinuity in the evolution of humankind due to the massive use of Promethean technologies decommissioning old plants, plus handling and storing (practically for ever) nuclear wastes. The same problem of too low an EROI exists for biofuels and photovoltaic technologies. This is to say, for the moment many of the proposed technological alternatives to fossil energy are not viable technologies; they are only currently feasible because they are heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Yet traditional economic theory tells us not to worry, the increased price of these energy sources as their supplies diminish will lead to new technological sources of energy. The information that has been provided in this book, from the historical overview to the theoretical and empirical implications, has illustrated that the Jevons Paradox is a very real threat to world energy security, as well as to the environment. Then, one may rightly ask, what is the solution? Should we stop looking for energy efficiency since this is a step in the wrong direction? It is not our intention in this book to condemn technology or to suggest the ‘right’ way to go in relation to human sustainability based on scientific analysis. Rather, our purpose is to show that technology is not the cure-all that many people believe it to be. Technology can expand the option space for humans and by providing this service it represents an important complement to the energy-environment solution. For example, technological energy-efficient improvements such as hybrid cars may represent a crucial component of a different trajectory of evolution of the metabolism of households in developed countries. However, the adoption of hybrid cars per se will not solve the problem of the unsustainability of modern lifestyles if adopted by a world population of 9 billion people. If the energy-environment situation is to improve, consumers will need to change their behaviour patterns by including concern for the environment among the priorities determining their choices. In the same way, policymakers and other important stakeholders will need to accept the challenge implied by ‘the tragedy of change’ (as discussed in Chapter 3) which is typical of evolving systems. Humans have to accept losing something in order to be able to retain something else. The need to deal with the tragedy of change, which is unavoidably associated with evolution, is essential in order to be able to deal with the Jevons Paradox. The big problem with the tragedy of change is that choices related to sustainability are choices that require reflexivity – the willingness to change yourself in order to be able to co-evolve with other humans and the environment. Unfortunately, choices based on reflexivity are not welcome in our modern society, since they imply dealing with the need for changing and re-discussing our own identity while dealing with moral issues. For this reason, humans try first to go for choices that, rather than being based on reflexivity, are based on externalization. The neoclassical economic paradigm is a good example of this: within this paradigm what is relevant is the willingness to pay to develop silver bullets and policies capable of preserving our own identity for as long as possible. But this paradigm leads to a dangerous form of denial of the obvious fact that humans have a responsibility over the choices that are made. According to the neoclassical economic paradigm, the process of becoming of humankind should be driven by the market and technological progress. By accepting this paradigm we can just keep doing what we are doing without thinking or reflecting on the consequences of our choices. We believe that reflexivity is required to deal with the Jevons Paradox and is the only way to handle the issue of sustainability. Therefore, we hope that policymakers, the scientists giving them advice and other powerful stakeholders will take heed of the Jevons Paradox. In fact, the Jevons Paradox will always be with us, no matter what new energy sources and silver bullets we come up with in the future, especially when we discover another Promethean technology.

3.3 Situating Muslim populations in Britain’s imperial history of “race”, class, and gender relations. As the literature on racial capitalism emphasises, Britain’s racial, class and gender relations developed in the context of its formation as an empire. Virdee focuses on precisely this imperial and colonial history, underscoring the co-constitution of racial and class relations. He argues that the historic integration of some British workers into the nation was “underpinned by its notion of a singular people united by race and religion” (Virdee 2014, 5). A British identity centred on whiteness relied on the racialized othering of members of the global British working class from Ireland, the Caribbean, East Africa and South Asia (ibid). Virdee charts the history of this national compact in which the entitlements of deserving white workers to employment rights, fair wages and state welfare, made possible by Britain’s imperial political economy (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018), took precedence over the rights of their colonised cousins. He notes that “class as a representational form and material relation was indelibly nationalized and racialized” (2014, 5). To this end, Shilliam shows constructions of the “white working class” as the “indigenous constituency, independent of colonial pasts, and unfairly displaced by multi-coloured newcomers”, which hinge on colonial distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor, are relevant today in relation to debates on Brexit (2019, 6). The result of the referendum on EU membership was explained as the revolt of “left behind” white working class voters, let down by a political class who had allowed excessive immigration. It is in this broader setting of “Taking Back Control” of Britain, offered by the Vote Leave campaign, that the experiences of an ethnically heterogeneous and largely working class British Muslim population, constructed as the undeserving poor, can be understood. Historically, British Muslims came predominantly from the Commonwealth countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, arriving to fill gaps in the British labour market in the post-war period, in manufacturing, the light industries, and the service sector (Peach 2006, 136). However, data from the last national census in 2011 shows that these groupings make up a falling percentage of the overall Muslim population, which numbers approximately 2.7 million people (MCB 2015). The proportion of Muslims who identify as “Black African” and “Black other” is rising, as is the proportion of those who describe themselves as “Arab” and “Asian other” (ibid.). This includes a growing Somali community, which the Muslim Council of Britain suggests could total 250,000 people (ibid.). Despite the ethnically heterogeneous makeup of Britain’s Muslims, structural inequalities reflected in unequal outcomes in housing, education, health, labour markets and the criminal justice system, cut across these groupings, albeit unevenly. Almost half of the Muslim population lives in the 10% most deprived areas in the UK, with 28% of households in social housing (MCB 2015). Given the link between deprived areas and poor health outcomes, Muslim women over the age of 65 are more afflicted by ill-health and disabilities, relative to the general population (Ibid). Muslims are unemployed at “nearly double” the rate of the general population, with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB 2015) citing a “religious penalty” compounding the broader discrimination faced by BME people in the labour market (Ibid). As Hall et al. (2017) show, groups already reliant on state welfare and public services have been the worst affected by austerity measures. For Britain’s Muslims, the reduction in quality of life has not simply been a consequence of class positioning, but is tied to how they are racialized as the undeserving poor, a process underway prior to the onset of austerity. Baker et al. show there were three “surges of interest in the subject” of so-called Muslim “benefit scroungers”, in 2001, 2003 and 2005; the first and last dates coinciding with the start of the War on Terror, and the London bombings (2013, 181), with a further “small peak” in 2008, coinciding with the GFC. They explore how initially it was prominent so-called “preachers of hate” who were maligned for being benefit scroungers, but that later this logic was applied by British newspapers to “any Muslim who receives benefits” (Baker et al. 2013, 187). Furthermore, these constructions were tied to right-wing critiques of a New Labour government accused of generous welfare “handouts” being “exploited by certain Muslims who want to destroy Britain’s way of life” (ibid). It is this intersection of “race” and class which has justified austerity politics targeted at the undeserving poor, composed of Britain’s racialized others, and within this to the everyday experience of Islamophobic hate crime.

232 Bridging the gap: insights from racial capitalism The scholarship on racial capitalism can provide insights into how Islamophobia and austerity intersect. Racial capitalism is rooted in traditions of black radical thought. This includes the work of sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox (e.g. Cox 1964), whose understanding of capitalism as a world system predates Wallerstein’s (1974) canonical contribution. It also influenced the more recognised and frequently-cited Cedric J. Robinson, author of Black Marxism (1983). Dissatisfied with orthodox Marxist accounts of the emergence of capitalism – conceived as an endogenous process centred on a territorially bounded set of European nations – Robinson (drawing on Cox) draws attention to two interrelated points (Robinson 2019, 79): that “race” and racism were central to the development of capitalism, and that capitalism itself was to be understood as a world system fundamentally enmeshed in and shaped by global processes. This scholarship connected global (imperial and colonial) histories of slavery, genocide and dispossession, to the production of contemporary racial hierarchies between states, and hierarchies of racialized populations within states. The lens of racial capitalism offers a way of historicising the global links between “race”, class, and gender relations in the formation of contemporary states. Processes of racialisation and gendering are central to the work of organising populations, dividing forms of labour (recognised as “work” and “non-work”), and attributing value to that labour (Bhattacharyya 2018, ix). The resulting racial and gendered hierarchies of life produced through this intersection of capitalism, “race” and gender, ensure that exploitation and dispossession are experienced predominantly by those parts of the population deemed expendable. This point can be briefly illustrated through El-Enany’s analysis of the fire at Grenfell Tower (2017). Residents of Grenfell were formed of an international working class, who came to be resident in Britain through histories of colonialism. Working class populations racialised as “non-white” are disproportionately confined to the higher floors of unsafe high-rise buildings, reflecting a “colonial logic of space” and exposing them to “premature and violent deaths” (El-Enany 2017). El-Enany considers the inescapability of the “colonial condition” through the case of Mohammad Alhajali, a 23 year-old Syrian refugee, who escaped a conflict zone only to perish in Grenfell. The case illustrates Danewid’s view regarding the underexplored connections between the treatment of marginalised populations in the Global South and Global North, through 232 practices of urban planning and racialised policing. London, São Paulo and Cape Town are global cities which are historic and ongoing “imperial terrains” (Danewid 2019, 292). As Robinson put it after a 1962 trip to what was then Southern Rhodesia, in present-day Zimbabwe: “Will the U.N. understand the pleas of the Blacks in the townships […], where most often three to four families must stay in one room the size of your kitchen […] of the tens of thousands unemployed because they are not educated, uneducated because they are unemployed, both because they are black? Africa understands, Asia understands, you and I and the millions of blacks in the U.S., Brazil and the West Indies understand, not because we are black or brown but because we have lived it and are living it now” (Robinson 2019, xv). These insights allow a rethink of the relationship between Islamophobia and austerity. Recognising the constitutive role of “race” and gender in capitalist reproduction, and in the construction of hierarchies of lives which are more or less disposable, we can explore how Islamophobia is implicated in the austerity-afflicted political economy of Britain. The next section provides an overview of the place of Muslim populations in Britain’s post/imperial history of raced, classed and gendered relations, to help make sense of how Islamophobia has become key to austerity