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Scholars who have written on the topic of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism in recent decades therefore generally have agreed with the premise of racial capitalism, whether or not they used this term. To invoke racial capitalism is to recognize the primal role of race in development and maintenance of capitalism. Although Cedric Robinson coined the term in Black Marxism (1983), W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935) detailed decades earlier how the racial division of labor and racist violence served capitalism. Racial capitalism also devastated the Indigenous, deeming them unworthy of the land and waters that had given them sustenance since the beginning of recorded time. There were (and are) commonalities among those brutalized by racial capitalism, whether they were (and are) Asian, Pacific Islander, African, Latin American, Indigenous and/or Native. Du Bois saw that by the end of the nineteenth century, the twinned conditions of capitalism and colonialism made racism a global dilemma. “The problem of the twentieth century,” he famously wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), “is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”75 Scholars can argue whether or not capitalism began as a global system, but they should agree that racial capitalism certainly did: that it continued as a global system, continually expanding into new areas in order to create an endless supply of surplus for reinvestment in a continuous loop.76 It was through an imperialist infrastructure, a world-system, that racial capitalism was and has been able to feed its hunger for resources, labor, and markets. Rather than characterizing imperialism as the “highest stage of capitalism,” as his contemporary in Russia did, it is probably more useful to see, as Du Bois did, that the reverse was true: early modern and modern imperialism created the conditions for racial capitalism.77 As scholars like Gerald Horne have detailed, imperial violence and encroachment allowed racial capitalism to spawn and spread.78 This process, of course, took centuries. 1492 marked simply a beginning. The same with 1619. The patterns of global inequities that we see today were mostly set in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries.79 As the discussion above suggests, capitalist empires relied on mixed methods of production, with both labor that was clearly capitalist (waged) and labor that some scholars characterize as non-capitalist (non-waged). Capitalist expropriation— again, the negation of the ability to live or build wealth outside of the market system—gave those that became capitalist earlier the ability to prevent or hamper others from retaining or building wealth. So, not only was the ladder kicked away, but it was used as a weapon to batter others down. To say capitalist imperialism with “capitalism” as the adjective modifying “imperialism” suits our purposes today better than the other way around as Lenin did. Lenin used “imperialism” as a modifier for “capitalism” for the narrow purpose of explaining the function of colonization to capitalist powers in his contemporary world. From about 1870, when Lenin was born, to 1916, when his essay came out, a great part of the world was under the colonial dominion of Europe, Japan, and the United States. Lenin was not considering pre-nineteenth century imperialism in his formulation. For a longer historical view, it is more useful to say capitalist imperialism because doing so acknowledges pre-nineteenth century imperialism, but also emphasizes capitalism as a rupture in the long world history of empires. The scale and scope of imperialism in the modern, capitalist era, as well as its intrusiveness in daily life distinguished it from earlier imperialisms such as those of the Roman, Greek, Mughal, Mongol, Han, Aztec, Songhai, premodern Caliphates, etc.80 Capitalist empires, distinct from pre-modern and early modern empires, both appropriate and expropriate. They seize tribute, wealth, and goods from subject peoples, and they take away wealth-making capacities of subject peoples by restructuring their labor and resources so that they are mostly (although not totally) oriented towards the market needs of the empire. So, to repeat the definition above: modern imperialism is when a stronger polity subjects a weaker one to its own economic preferences through the expropriation of resources and labor.

Unmaking the Political Economy of Empire through an Alternative Internationalism COVID-19 in South Africa is a pandemic of racial capitalism and global white supremacy, exemplified in approaches that champion vaccine nationalism and apartheid. Ever since the potent deployment of neoliberal social policy, most parts of the Global South were covertly and overtly forced into a project of the “Americanization of social policy.” Layla Brown-Vincent, for example, provides the link between public policy and racialized neoliberal globalization by observing U.S. responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.38 She suggests that, “while the US government struggles with the nearly insurmountable difficulties presented by its profit-driven health care system, coupled with its gross lack of willingness to take the pandemic seriously, it becomes abundantly clear that while the Corona is a virus of pandemic proportions, the true pandemic is racial capitalism.”39 South Africa’s domestic and international policy choices need to be seen as located within a hierarchical, racialized financial architecture that privileges Western nations, thereby maintaining their genetic survival and dominance. This is especially the case in relation to policy efforts that champion both vaccine nationalism and apartheid. If COVID-19 has thrown into relief the political, health, and economic decadence of Western capitalist civilization, a corollary of this is that such decadent civilization is now sustained by debt. In the Hebrew scriptures, the writer of the Book of Proverbs noted that “the wealthy rule over the poor, a bor rower is a slave to a lender.”40 The slave/master relationship constitutes the rubric and foundations of colonial modernity and public policy making in the contemporary era. Throughout the twentieth century, the maintenance of and resistance to the slave/master relationship took on different types of internationalisms. The status quo slave architecture was preserved by the mythological status of the United States as an exceptional civilization.41 In the post-Second World War era, this was initially championed by Harry Truman’s U.S.-led internationalism that insisted on the role of embedded liberal internationalism and postwar peace and prosperity to prevent the return of world war. Liberal internationalism cemented a social contract that further entrenched racial hierarchies, inequalities, and preservation of white life. International financial institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, and the General Agreement of Trade and Tariffs, and later the World Trade Organization, were justified as instrumental in preventing another global war, thereby establishing U.S. global hegemony. South Africa should broaden medical solidarity and reject the IMF- and creditor-driven limit placed on government sector salaries. Because of these limits, former colonized countries have been losing medical personnel to the North Atlantic states. States must use their precious resources to enhance public medical education and train medical workers within communities to provide public health services. The medical internationalism of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, with the Cuban brigades in the lead, must become a model for the world through the World Health Organization.42 Cuba’s revolutionary transcendence of imperial health care was achieved through a sovereign national vision, predicated on global solidarity and the development of a biotechnology industry consisting of more than thirty research institutions and manufacturers, under the aegis of the state-run conglomerate BioCubaFarma. Cuban initiatives challenge the commodification in the global vaccine value chain. Cuba plans to export its Soberana-2 vaccine to other Latin American countries and the Global South in general.43 It is fashionable in the international discourse of nation-states to refer to governmental actions in the global capitalist epoch as “neutral” happenings in race relations, abstracted from imperial violence. Yet, the history of the nation-state is a violent one, fraught with institutional racism and racialization par excellence. The South African political scientist Surren Pillay urges the intellectual community to challenge the historical evolution of the nation-state. He argues: “Rather than Westphalia as a central moment, we should start with 1492 as central to our account of modernity. This is the date that marks the encounter between the West and Rest—the West and the Other, the West and the New World.”44 More recently, Mahmood Mamdani posits that “the nation-state was born of two developments on the Iberian Peninsula. One was ethnic cleansing, whereby the Castilian monarchy sought to create a homogeneous national homeland for Christian Spaniards by ejecting and converting those among them who were strangers to the nation—Moors and Jews. The other development was the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas by the same Castilian monarchy that spearheaded ethnic cleansing.”45 In a related critical tradition, Gurminder K. Bhambra argues that “contemporary politics is generally viewed through the lens of the nation-state, which is widely, but erroneously, understood to have its origins in the system of sovereign states that came into being in Europe in 1648.”46 However, as Bhambra continues, “the racialized hierarchies of empire defined the broader polity beyond the nation-state and, after decolonization, have continued to construct inequalities of citizenship within states that have only recently become national.”47 The only way out of the global crisis is a reinvented third world internationalism and a divorce from empire, colonial ideas, and institutions that covertly and overtly perpetuate the suffering of human and nonhuman communities alike. Frantz Fanon, in recognizing that the colonized world had materially birthed the Global North, prophetically declared: “So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would almost be an obscene caricature.”48 Unmaking South Africa’s health inequalities would require the abandonment of the racialized neoliberal institutions that inform its contemporary health policy choices. The entire private health sector must be nationalized, and smaller medical centers need to be created so that people can easily access public health facilities. The government must withdraw from public insurance for private health care. Public health systems must be strengthened, including the production of medical equipment and medicines, as well as the distribution of essential medicines (the prices of which must be regulated). The idea that the global health architecture is organized around the commodification of public goods could never be more apparent. States in the Global North have dismissed the call from South Africa and India to suspend intellectual property rules regarding the vaccine. These northern states have underfunded the COVAX project, which, as a result, is at a high risk of failure, with growing expectations that many people in developing countries will not see a vaccine before 2024. Insurgent vaccine nationalism and global apartheid define contemporary approaches to the pandemic, with countries like Canada building up reserves of five vaccines per Canadian. Countries in the Global South like South Africa, meanwhile, must use precious scarce resources to enhance public medical education and train medical workers within communities to provide public health services. An alternative form of internationalism was what the former slaves and colonized polities conceptualized in opposition to a colonial modernity dating back to 1492. It was ignited by the Haitian Revolution of 1804, heralding Black internationalism and a break with institutionalized slavery and imperial domination, and culminated in the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the subsequent formation of the Non-Aligned Movement to offset bipolar rivalries of the United States and Soviet Union. Adom Getachew postulates that, “while the Anglophone world emerged as the central site of black internationalism by the end of Second World War, anticolonial worldmaking was not limited to the central characters of the Black Atlantic. Broader political formations such as the Bandung Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement advanced the project of constituting a post-imperial world order.”49 The aim was to subvert colonial violence and unmake the world of empire through third world internationalism, solidarity, and a new human, born from the subaltern construction of political and social realities for global liberation. It allowed the newly independent countries to lead a development paradigm based on their national, popular, and sovereign interests. The colonized peoples hoped to construct a postimperial financial architecture through the New Economic International Order. Visions of a postimperial world, however, were prematurely aborted through the aggression of the capitalist states that incessantly subverted the former slave’s agency. As geographer Richard Peet notes, third world efforts at achieving economic reform continued in the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and through the call for a New Economic International Order. These efforts were increasingly resisted by the United States, with repressive imperial ideas coming particularly from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank.50 The story of decolonization cannot be adequately narrated along an antagonistic axis of disparate territorial autonomy against the global imperium. Rather, decolonization in its fullest sense, Getachew suggests, has to be explored as the possibility of a truly nonimperial world order.51 Yet, the Global South experienced the opposite, as the Cold War years inflicted structural violence on third world countries. The liberal international order was sustained to preserve the dominance of a racialized U.S. empire and its institutions.

Abstract In the influential 1995 article “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” Bruce Link and Jo Phelan described social and political factors as “fundamental causes” of death and disease. Whitney Pirtle has recently declared racial capitalism another such fundamental cause. Using the case of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, she has argued that racial capitalism's role in that situation meets each of the criteria Link and Phelan's article outlines: racial capitalism influenced multiple disease outcomes, affected disease outcomes through multiple risk factors, involved access to flexible resources that can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease, and was reproduced over time through the continual replacement of intervening mechanisms. We argue for Pirtle's conclusion using the extensive literature on racial capitalism and case studies concerning housing in the United States and Brazil and what Naomi Klein has termed “corona capitalism” in India. If races correspond to hierarchies of material security, as suggested by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, then these hierarchies and their causal effects are fundamental determinants of public health. Essays In the oft-cited 1995 article “Social Conditions as Fundamental Causes of Disease,” Bruce Link and Jo Phelan describe social and political factors as “fundamental causes” of death and disease. Part of the inspiration for the authors’ claim was the intractability of poor health outcomes in impoverished communities, even of particular diseases. “[E]ven if one effectively modifies intervening mechanisms or eradicates some diseases,” the authors argue, “an association between a fundamental cause and disease will re-emerge. … [F]undamental causes can defy efforts to eliminate their effects when attempts to do so focus solely on the mechanisms that happen to link them to disease in a particular situation.”1 Link and Phelan's analysis presents an important question: how to diagnose the social conditions themselves. Recently, sociologist Whitney Pirtle suggested a provocative answer when she asserted that racial capitalism should be considered a “fundamental cause” of death and disease.2 Using the case of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, she has argued that racial capitalism's role in the crisis there meets each of the criteria Link and Phelan's article outlines: racial capitalism influenced multiple disease outcomes, affected disease outcomes through multiple risk factors, involved access to flexible resources that can be used to minimize both risks and the consequences of disease, and was reproduced over time through the continual replacement of intervening mechanisms. In this essay, we will argue for Pirtle's conclusion by supplementing it with tools identified by Arlene Bierman and James Dunn. Bierman and Dunn provocatively claim that “social class dwarfs healthcare as a determinant of health.” Bierman and Dunn take it that class is linked to health outcomes through its influence on populations’ abilities to reliably access “basic necessities”: housing and food. Poverty is the “leading cause of avoidable mortality” in part because of the “forced choice” that impoverishment presents to low-income people: whether to pay rent, buy food, or seek medical care.3 No matter how a person in this predicament chooses, something will go missing, undersupplied, or come by erratically, which will become a vector for negative health outcomes. But decades of social science have also linked race with these same outcomes. Moreover, authors in the literature on racial capitalism tie race and class together with the broader system of capitalism that determines how income, wealth, and social advantages are produced and distributed. Racial capitalism's effects on public health can thus be understood as a fundamental cause of health outcomes using the same approach that Bierman and Dunn used to link health outcomes to class. For public health research, what is key is perhaps less whether we use the terms “race” or “class” but the system of hierarchies that both these terms help to categorize: different strata of material security and insecurity, or the degree of security with respect to “basic necessities.” Racial Capitalism The term “racial capitalism” is used by people expressing a set of intellectual positions about our global social structure that developed over the twentieth century. The sociologist Oliver C. Cox developed some of the key building blocks of what became racial capitalism theory in Class, Caste, and Race (1948) and The Foundations of Capitalism (1959). He concluded that “racial antagonism … developed within the capitalist system as one of its fundamental traits” and, furthermore, that “racial feeling developed concomitantly with the development of our modern social system.”4 The term “racial capitalism” originates from African theorists like Neville Alexander and Harold Wolpe, and it was popularized in the United States by theorists including Cedric Robinson.5 Theorists of racial capitalism hold that racism is a functional part of capitalism—that is, that racism is not merely part of the explanation of how capitalism got here in the first place but also an active part of the reason capitalism persists.6 Geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, one of today's leading theorists of racial capitalism, introduces useful specificity about how racism functions in a capitalist world, defining it as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”7 Vulnerability to premature death comes, of course, in many forms: at least as many forms as there are ways to die prematurely. But here it is instructive to recall Bierman and Dunn's reasoning for classifying social class as a prime driver of health outcomes. First, they point out the what: that poverty is the “leading cause of avoidable mortality.”8 Second, they point out the why: that impoverishment presents low-income people with a “forced choice” between paying rent, buying food, or seeking medical care, thus ensuring that something essential will be shortchanged. It is not poverty in and of itself, then, that causes death but what poverty reliably does: it causes insecurities or precarities that have an understood and deleterious effect on health outcomes. Race, theorists of racial capitalism point out, has this same effect on populations. Food insecurity is an important determinant of public health. Undernutrition, particularly of children, is a primary cause of ill health and premature mortality in the Global South.9 Famines represent an extreme case of food insecurity. Groundbreaking work by philosopher and economist Amartya Sen highlighted a surprising fact about this extreme case that is politically informative about the structure of our society: famines often are unrelated to food availability. This point is counterintuitive. Before Sen wrote, the traditional approach to explaining famines appealed to food scarcity: famine involves starvation, and starvation is lack of food. This “food availability approach” was assumed in classic works of economics and philosophy (most famously by Thomas Malthus). If you wanted to explain a famine, you appealed to activity in or of the natural world that would interact with the food supply: pests, droughts, heat waves.10 In “Famines,” Sen appeals to two cases. The first is a famine in Ireland following a potato crop failure in 1822. There, people starved to death even though there was plenty of corn to eat. The second concerns the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people starved to death even though food production had actually increased relative to 1941, when there was no famine at all. The food availability approach does not offer a satisfying explanation to these famines. In both cases, Sen argues, the failures were sociopolitical: the reluctance of the British Empire to defend its colonized subjects rather than particular elites’ financial interests.11 The reason that people starved in Bengal and Ireland is explicable in terms of the framework offered by racial capitalism, especially as explained by Robinson and Gilmore. Robinson notes that the social structure enabled by splitting the ruled into separate populations arranged into a sharp, vertically organized hierarchy was developed in Europe (to the disadvantage of groups like the Irish and the Slavs) and came to operate on a world scale (incorporating Africans and Indigenous peoples) because of European colonization and subsequent capitalism.12 These distinctions in hierarchy, Gilmore's definition tells us, become differences in group-level vulnerability, with groups further down the racial hierarchy systematically experiencing more vulnerability than groups farther up. This stratification is exploitable by the political powers that be: in Ireland, to defend profits and colonial control by largely English elites (higher up the racial hierarchy than the Irish) and, in Bengal, to defend the strategic interests of the British military (which feared Japanese invasion in rural Bengal). The theory of ecologically unequal exchange allows us to tell this same kind of story on a global scale, and with a wider reference to ecological phenomena than with the narrow focus on agricultural systems. This theory holds that our world economic system moves energy and biophysical resources from poorer to richer countries. This scheme in turn distributes ecological risks perversely, tending to concentrate them in the Global South.13 With the Global South carved into planetary politics by the same forces that colonized Bengal and Ireland, richer countries like those in Europe are “draining ecological capacity from extractive regions by importing resource-intensive products and shifting environmental burdens to the South through the export of waste.”14 Similarly, environmental economists and geographers have advanced the “pollution haven hypothesis,” which predicts that companies faced with stringent and costly environmental regulations in one country or region will move production to places with less-stringent regulation. The relationship is causal: higher-income countries (disproportionately yesterday's colonizers) have more economic leverage against companies and more politically empowered populations, which correlates with tougher environmental regulations. Some empirical work has lent support to this hypothesis.15 The locating of manufacturing in countries with weaker environmental regulations redistributes environmental risk along the same lines as the ecologically unequal exchange theory predicts and can be viewed as one causal mechanism within that theory's larger story.16 Inequitable distribution of environmental risk doesn't happen only at the global scale. Within countries, there are “green crime havens”—areas of unlawfully elevated environmental risk. As with the pollution haven hypothesis, this concept represents the geographical distribution of pollutants and environmental vulnerability in ways that track power relations.17 And, as with the other theories, the relationship described is a causal one: researchers at Auburn University and the University of Florida explain that the havens arise “as part of power differences and corresponding zoning decisions,” not simply as a result of the havens’ proximity to natural resources that companies want access to for production.18 Whether one relies on the globally scoping ecologically unequal exchange theory, the transnational pollution haven hypothesis, or the idea of subnational green crime havens, the balance of evidence suggests that the geographical distribution of pollutants and environmental risk reflects social power dynamics. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the relationship between the political power of a population and its susceptibility to environmental vulnerability is a causal one, not simply a set of unhappy coincidences. This fits squarely into Gilmore's definition of racism: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Racial capitalism, then, links racial power and security disparities themselves to environmental exposures and health outcomes. Housing Racial capitalism also explains stable, long-term, structural stratifications in housing. Consider the examples of the United States and Brazil. In the United States, a variety of systems secure the investments of landlords by shifting the financial and social risks of housing toward the most vulnerable residents.19 Working-class and affluent renters pay similar amounts of rent but live in housing of vastly different levels of quality because working-class renters are often confined to dilapidated housing stock.20 Low-income renters are identified via complex surveillance systems that function much like a criminal record: appearances in housing court, credit problems, and run-ins with the law can all mar a low-income tenant's record and prevent them from accessing safe housing.21 Racial stratifications show up in the same pattern: Black renters are disproportionately targeted for eviction, by predatory lending, and by the police, all circumstances that serve to increase these renters’ vulnerability to housing insecurity.22 Urban informal settlements are characterized by a combination of concentrated poverty, insecure and poor-quality housing, political disenfranchisement, and a lack of access to essential life-supporting services such as clean water, sanitation, and health care. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's second largest city, 1.39 million people (22 percent of the total population) live in informal settlements.23 Morro da Providência, Brazil's oldest favela, was first settled by veterans of the War of Canudos in 1897. Following the war, soldiers settled on the morro (“hill”), and later, opportunities for unskilled laborers also attracted formerly enslaved people (who had been freed in 1888). At this time, the government had given little thought or support to how newly liberated people would survive; hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved people came to Rio seeking employment provided by Rio's wealthy families. In Morro da Providência, these newly freed people had nowhere to live, but they had access to free land in the morros. Many of these dynamics are still in place in Morro da Providência. The population is largely Black and mixed race; by contrast, Rio's wealthy southern zone is 80 percent White.24 Land in Rio is incredibly valuable, and proximity to the capital city is a necessity for many who rely on the opportunities there for survival. While the government of Brazil has worked with favelas to improve infrastructure and expand access to sanitation, residents of Morro da Providência live in a state of constant precarity given Brazil's history of policies that result in the displacement and destruction of these informal settlements. India's “Corona Capitalism” Racial capitalism does not apply only to long-term, structural phenomena like housing and ecological exchange. As we saw in Sen's example of famines, it also applies to short-run crises of material insecurity. In this final section, we consider another short-run example: the ramifications of stratification under racial capitalism in the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic. India's pandemic response has demonstrated the symbiotic relationship between racial capitalism and disaster capitalism

Capitalism is predicated upon a racialized hierarchy of gendered bodies and accompanying racialization of space: a heavily polluting aluminum smelting plant, crucial to US 20thcentury industrialization, employed Black laborers in the most physically demanding and hazardous jobs and dumped lethal industrial waste adjacent to the Black residential area. Roberta has struggled to keep herself and her community alive. Whether fighting for safety measures and dignity in the workplace, or for government accountability and hazardous waste remediation outside of work, survival has involved constant strategizing of how to leverage limited power against the impossible odds of an uncaring government colluding with a multinational giant. For communities of color living in capitalism’s toxic “sacrifice zones” (Lerner, 2012), “life’s work,” the gendered labor of social reproduction (Mitchell et al., 2004), is characterized by daily negotiations with death-dealing structures that complicate, and exceed, the already challenging demands of obtaining food, maintaining a household, and sustaining community networks. Meanwhile, in Flint, Michigan, four years after news broke of widespread lead poisoning, children’s safety remains a concern for caregivers wrestling with conflicting information from government officials and scientists. In 2016, eight-year-old Mari Copeny, “Little Miss Flint,” wrote to then-President Obama, asking him to visit. Copeny and her mother, Lulu Brezzell, have raised over $350,000 through donations and fundraisers to provide residents bottled water (Suggs, 2019). Their activism makes visible the often-hidden labor of survival in zones of “organized abandonment” (Gilmore, 2008)— the uncelebrated, mundane, and tedious work of hauling, unwrapping, and distributing water, reading reports, attending hearings, navigating broken trust and frustration, considering flight, and enduring. Despite unique histories, rooted in the South and the Rust Belt respectively, Badin and Flint share characteristics that are tragically common among predominantly Black communities in the US: a greater likelihood of premature death (Gilmore, 2002), due in part to the racialized concentration of lethal industrial waste, reflecting state neglect and collusion with industry (Holifield, 2001; Taylor, 2014). Environmental racism is a constitutive element of “racial capitalism,” a Black radical theorization of how capitalism develops through the proliferation of social hierarchies based in the devaluation of racialized people (Gilmore, 2002; Pulido, 2016; Robinson, 2000). Racially disproportionate exposure to toxicity is a material manifestation of capitalism’s “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011), which erodes the environmental conditions sustaining life. However, Badin’s sacrifice and Flint’s abandonment are neither incidental nor accidental. Racial zones of toxicity and abandonment are the shadow geographies of empire. Celebrated for their productivity during industrialization, their subsequent economic decline and rising concerns about contamination reflect a process of ruination (Stoler, 2008) that we argue is symptomatic of a colonial relationship with the US imperial state. Rendered materially and symbolically surplus, these territories are erased from national imaginaries of progress; such sites of production that have been sacrificed for the so-called “national good” point to the ways that “imperialism as a way of life [animates] the architecture of sociopolitical relations at home as well as abroad” (Sundberg, 2015: 210). Yet life endures in the shadows of empire.

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. Ethnic Studies scholars have long grappled with the relationship between racism and capitalism (Barrera, 1979; Marable, 1983; Almaguer, 1994). Cedric Robinson coined the term racial capitalism in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. First published in 1983, he argued that racism was a structuring logic of capitalism. His work did not initially circulate beyond a small circle of scholars (e.g. Kelley, 1990; Gilmore, 2007), but the rise of critical ethnic studies (Ma´rquez and Rana, 2015) has introduced a new generation to it. While this is new to some (Bonds and Inwood, forthcoming; Driscoll Derickson, 2014; Ruiz, 2015), there is, in fact, older geographic scholarship that sees capitalism as deeply racial (Wilson, 1992; Blaut, 1993; Woods, 1998; Gilmore, 2002). Thus, the 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. A focus on racial capitalism requires greater attention to the essential processes that shaped the modern world, such as colonization, primitive 526 Progress in Human Geography 41(4) accumulation, slavery, and imperialism. As McKittrick notes, ‘the geographic management of blackness, race, and racial difference (and thus nonblackness) hinges on a longstanding but unacknowledged plantation past’ (2011: 953). By insisting that we are still living with the legacy of these processes, racial capitalism requires that we place contemporary forms of racial inequality in a materialist, ideological and historical framework. Dominant historical narratives of racism locate its origins in European colonization. Robinson (2000) challenges this notion by documenting its prior roots in Europe. This is key, because although he and others, such as Melamed (2015: 77), insist that, ‘capitalism is racial capitalism’, this historicization suggests that racism predates capitalism and therefore can be used by diverse economic systems, including colonization and slavery. Indeed, to treat colonization, for example, as solely an economic process is not to fully grasp its human impact, logic, or legacy (Said, 1979; Blaut, 1993; Fanon, 1965; Galeano, 1973; Blackhawk, 2008). We can never overlook the fact that racial ideology (along with guns) enabled colonization. Though conquest and domination were not always the sole motives, the elaborate ideology that constructed indigenous people as less than fully human was entirely necessary for the colonial project. Indeed, Smith (2012) has suggested the genocide is the core logic driving colonization. In the case of the US and other settler societies, colonization led to massive land theft, which was not only a form of primitive accumulation, but also became the basis of those countries’ national territories at the cost of native nations (Hixson, 2013). Earlier debates sought to reconcile racism and capitalism (Wilson, 1992; Barrera, 1979; Almaguer, 1994), but critical ethnic studies and its precursors insist that race cannot always be contained by capitalism (Omi and Winant, 1986; HoSang et al., 2012; Roediger, 2008; Lipsitz, 2006. Though racism has been and is deployed to facilitate maximum accumulation, racism can also exceed the desires of various fractions of capital. Consider the overt racism of the contemporary US Republican Party, which is arguably counter to the desires of much of multicultural corporate America (Melamed, 2011). Given the variability of racism to capitalism, I consider the production of difference and value as the most fundamental point of connection. Accordingly, this should be the starting point for EJ analyses. 1 Producing difference and value The centrality of value to capitalist production is well-known. But there are multiple ways of conceptualizing value, and by extension, differential value. Differential value refers to the production of recognized differences that result in distinct kinds of values. These differences in value become critical in the accumulation of surplus – both profits and power (Cacho, 2011; see also Gilmore, 2002). Just as uneven space is essential to the unfolding of capitalism (Harvey, 2001), human difference is essential to the production of differential value. Relationality is key to the production of differential value (Cacho, 2012: 13). For example, whiteness derives its meanings and value from various forms of nonwhiteness, which Cacho and Barrett call a kind of negativity. Negativity is important because it ‘forms the ground of possibilities for value’ (Barrett in Cacho, 2012: 13). While this is familiar terrain for critical human geographers (Anderson, 1987; Kobayashi and Peake, 1994), it is rarely reflected in empirical geographic work. Instead, most of us examine racial outcomes without considering racial production. Analyzing racial production is not merely a theoretical exercise however. Rather, it informs how a problem is conceptualized, and thus shapes political strategy. Indeed, focusing on a particular racial/ethnic group, rather than racial capitalism, per se, may lead to improved conditions for some, Pulido 527 while overlooking capitalism’s incessant need to actively produce difference somewhere. 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: 77) By theorizing the racialized production of differential value, racial capitalism illuminates not only the inevitability of environmental injustice, but the structural challenges facing activists. 2 Operationalizing nonwhite devaluation Theories of racial capitalism highlight how racial difference is produced and how that relative valuation gets operationalized. This means not only how ideas and practices of devaluation circulate, but how they become institutionalized, and the implications for the racially subordinate and dominant. There are many ways racism can be harnessed by economic processes. I will mention two that are widelyacknowledged as manifestations of racial capitalism: land and labor. Land is thoroughly saturated with racism. There are at least two primary land processes to consider: appropriation and access. Appropriation refers to the diverse ways that land was taken from native people, as previously mentioned. Once land was severed from native peoples and commodified, the question of access arose, which is deeply racialized. Numerous laws and practices reserved land ownership for whites. Indeed some groups, such as Asians, actually lost land they once owned (Ruiz, 2015; Curry, 1921). Differential value is also produced and extracted via racialized labor systems – black chattel slavery being one of the most profound examples. Smith (2012) asserts that slavery is one of the key logics of white supremacy: the ability to commodify human beings. Understanding slavery’s history and ballast enables us to appreciate the extent to which devalued black bodies, to paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, have financed both whiteness and the American Dream (2015: 132), and I would add global white supremacy (da Silva, 2007). Recent research reveals the economic contributions of slavery to the US economy and infrastructure, as well as the extreme violence necessary to maintain such a system (Baptist, 2014; Johnson, 2013; Wilder, 2013; for a critique, see Hudson, 2016). Upon slavery’s conclusion, numerous legal and de jure forms of labor discrimination and exploitation limited the life chances of nonwhite workers while boosting the opportunities and status of white ones (Roediger, 1991). Dualwage systems, racially-exclusive labor unions, racialized divisions of labor, share-cropping, and related practices ensured a vulnerable supply of low-wage workers (Barrera, 1979; Saxton, 1995; Almaguer, 1994; Kelley, 1990; Woods, 1998). Racialized economic policy has amplified these effects, as seen in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act’s limited protections for occupations dominated by African American, Mexican, and Asian workers. More recently, Gilmore (2007) has shown how the problem of surplus labor, which is disproportionately nonwhite, has been ‘solved’ by the rise of the prison industrial complex. Just as labor arrangements and economic and social policy are constituitive of economic formations, so too are ecologies of resource extraction, processing, and disposal. Many EJ policies and scholarship conceptualize both racism and waste practices as externalities, rather than as fundamental to the very fabric of racial capitalism. Yet if racism is continually creating differential value, it is only logical that capital (and 528 Progress in Human Geography 41(4) other nondemocratic economic systems) would incorporate this uneven geography of value into its calculus. As Pellow has noted, the production of social inequalities by race, class, gender, and nation is not an aberration or the result of market failures. Rather, it is evidence of the normal, routine, functioning of capitalist economies. Modern market economies are supposed to produce social inequalities and environmental inequalities. (2007: 17) Industry and manufacturing require sinks – places where pollution can be deposited. Sinks typically are land, air, or water, but racially devalued bodies can also function as ‘sinks’. Taking this a step further, Moore (2015) has argued that capitalism is a way of organizing nature. Specifically, capitalism functions by restructuring nature. And since humans are nature, we must recognize that capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level. This has nothing to do with malicious intent (Pulido, 2000) and other liberal conceptions of racism. Rather, this is capital acting upon a larger differential valuation (Pellow, 2007), or, in the recent case of leadcontaminated water in Flint, Michigan, the neoliberal state, both of which are part of the ‘ecology of capitalism’ (Moore, 2015).

The Potential for Climate Catastrophe There are four key reasons to be concerned over the potential of a global climate catastrophe. First, there are warnings from history. Climate change (either regional or global) has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies (37) and in each of the five mass extinction events in Phanerozoic Earth history (38). The current carbon pulse is occurring at an unprecedented geological speed and, by the end of the century, may surpass thresholds that triggered previous mass extinctions (39, 40). The worst-case scenarios in the IPCC report project temperatures by the 22nd century that last prevailed in the Early Eocene, reversing 50 million years of cooler climates in the space of two centuries (41). This is particularly alarming, as human societies are locally adapted to a specific climatic niche. The rise of large-scale, urbanized agrarian societies began with the shift to the stable climate of the Holocene ∼12,000 y ago (42). Since then, human population density peaked within a narrow climatic envelope with a mean annual average temperature of ∼13 °C. Even today, the most economically productive centers of human activity are concentrated in those areas (43). The cumulative impacts of warming may overwhelm societal adaptive capacity. Second, climate change could directly trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international conflict, or exacerbate infectious disease spread, and spillover risk. These could be potent extreme threat multipliers. Third, climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. This is the path of systemic risk. Global crises tend to occur through such reinforcing “synchronous failures” that spread across countries and systems, as with the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (44). It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe. The potential of systemic climate risk is marked: The most vulnerable states and communities will continue to be the hardest hit in a warming world, exacerbating inequities. Fig. 1 shows how projected population density intersects with extreme >29 °C mean annual temperature (MAT) (such temperatures are currently restricted to only 0.8% of Earth’s land surface area). Using the medium-high scenario of emissions and population growth (SSP3-7.0 emissions, and SSP3 population growth), by 2070, around 2 billion people are expected to live in these extremely hot areas. Currently, only 30 million people live in hot places, primarily in the Sahara Desert and Gulf Coast (43). Extreme temperatures combined with high humidity can negatively affect outdoor worker productivity and yields of major cereal crops. These deadly heat conditions could significantly affect populated areas in South and southwest Asia(47). Fig. 2 takes a political lens on extreme heat, overlapping SSP3-7.0 or SSP5-8.5 projections of >29 °C MAT circa 2070, with the Fragile States Index (a measurement of the instability of states). There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming. If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur. Finally, climate change could irrevocably undermine humanity’s ability to recover from another cataclysm, such as nuclear war. That is, it could create significant latent risks (Table 1): Impacts that may be manageable during times of stability become dire when responding to and recovering from catastrophe. These different causes for catastrophic concern are interrelated and must be examined together.

V. CO N C LU S I O N ‘Racial capitalism’ as an analytic presents a fundamental challenge for international economic law because the latter is fundamentally linked to racial capitalism understood as a material structure. The interlinking of race and capitalist accumulation or, more accurately, the making of race as a tool for capitalist accumulation are old and entrenched, but its reproduction is not smooth or automatic. It depends both on spectacular acts of violence, such as those taking place at the borders of rich states, and on a multitude of dispersed, yet inter-connected, acts of governance, decision-making, and sorting that are no less violent and exploitative simply because they are mundane. When referring to ‘violence’ here, I do not engage with concepts of ‘slow’ or ‘structural’ violence, useful as they may be in other contexts.99 Rather, I have in mind fairly conventional conceptions of violence: injured bodies, death, and physical inability to access certain parts of the earth. This type of violence in particular is considered alien to international investment law, or, rather, the two have been conceptualized as antithetical: international investment law is a peaceful way of resolving economic disputes and, even more so, it is a means of disciplining the violent impulses of the (Southern) state. As this paper has shown, this is patently incorrect. Full protection and security is a standard that calls forth a violent, repressive state, provided that this violence is directed against specific groups of people and seeks to maintain the conditions of enrichment of other groups of people. Some would say that these two groups are racialized people on the one hand and white people on the other. Others will retort that the two groups are really the working class and peasantry on the one hand and the capitalist class on the other. The political and jurisprudential contribution of ‘racial capitalism’ as an analytic is to say that this is a false dichotomy.

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress may soon embark on a racially-fraught policy battle over “welfare.” “We can lift our citizens from welfare, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity,” Trump said in his State of the Union address last week, the latest signal that Republicans want “welfare reform” this year.Trump has often pandered to racists among his supporters. He said Mexico sends “rapists” to the United States and that there were some “fine people” among the neo-Nazis who staged a deadly protest last year in Charlottesville, Virginia. When the president said Mexican heritage made it impossible for a judge to be fair, House Speaker Paul Ryan called it the “textbook definition” of racist. The word “welfare” is different. It’s a standard political term that Democrats, Republicans and journalists alike use ― though Republicans use it the most often. There’s nothing overtly racialized about welfare. You can even find it in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

And yet, the word is often loaded with racial meaning. As , much of the public has a distorted view of which groups receive the bulk of assistance from government programs. Fifty-nine percent of Americans say either that most welfare recipients are black, or that welfare recipiency is about the same among black and white people. The numbers reflect a significant overestimation of the number of black Americans benefiting from the largest programs. Medicaid had more than 70 million beneficiaries in 2016, of whom 43 percent were white, 18 percent black, and 30 percent Hispanic. Of 43 million food stamp recipients that year, 36.2 percent were white, 25.6 percent black, 17.2 percent Hispanic and 15.5 percent unknown. (Food stamps are formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.)In one sense, HuffPost’s survey asked an abstract question: The federal government doesn’t run a program that is actually called “welfare.” The word can describe any instance of the government helping people or businesses, though it’s most commonly used to describe programs that benefit the poor. These days, to Republican lawmakers, welfare means Medicaid, food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Paul Ryan and hardline conservatives in the House of Representatives have said they want to make changes to those three programs this year under the banner of welfare reform. Historically, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is probably the program that has most frequently been called welfare, as it was created in the famous “welfare reform” of 1996. As a result of that reform, the program today is much smaller than its predecessor, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and it only served 2.7 million people in 2016. Of those, 36.9 percent were Hispanic, 27.6 percent white, and 29.1 percent black ― meaning that if they had this particular program in mind, HuffPost’s survey respondents who said the number of white and black beneficiaries are “about the same” were basically right. Survey respondents’ estimation of who receives welfare tracked closely to their estimation of who gets food stamps. Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents said the program’s recipients are mostly black or that there are as many black Americans as white Americans receiving benefits. Only 21 percent correctly said there are more white than black food stamp recipients. “Across the programs people overestimate the share of recipients who are black,” said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a senior analyst with the Center for Law and Social Policy. “It’s not surprising because we all know people’s images of public benefits is driven by stereotype.” Trump himself harbors mistaken views of who receives welfare benefits, according to reporting by NBC News. During a meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus last March, one member of Congress told Trump that welfare cuts, which the president had proposed in his budget, would harm her constituents, specifying that not all of them were black. Trump said, “Really? Then what are they?”Trump supporters are also more likely than Clinton voters to overestimate the share of welfare and public housing benefits that go to black recipients. The perceptions of who benefits from programs may affect the favorability of the programs themselves. White Americans are more likely to support “assistance to the poor” than “welfare,” one 2014 study found. And other polling has shown that whites are 30 points likelier to agree that “average Americans have gotten less than they deserve” than they are to say the same about black Americans. Last year, House Republicans and Trump signaled they wanted reforms to food stamps, specifically increased “work requirements” that would deny benefits to the sliver of SNAP and Medicaid recipients who are able bodied but don’t have jobs. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested he didn’t have much interest in pursuing major changes to safety net programs. Even without McConnell’s support for a full-fledged reform of food stamps, Congress will definitely have to consider the $70 billion program later this year because it needs to be reauthorized. Last week, Trump and Ryan talked about “workforce development,” in what might be a new euphemism for Ryan’s longstanding goal of shrinking the federal safety net. Ryan reportedly told fellow Republicans at a GOP retreat in West Virginia last week that workforce development means “getting people the skills and opportunity to get into the workforce.”

Ronald Reagan, the former star of “Bedtime for Bonzo,” was having trouble gaining traction in the presidential race he hoped to upend. It was 1976, and as the new candidate shook hands in diners, gymnasiums and town fairs, he hit upon a crowd-pleaser, a riff that caught the crowd’s attention by playing to its fears — call it a 1970s version of “Build That Wall.”“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” Reagan said in his folksy baritone during a luncheon in Asheville, N.C. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. … Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”On audio recordings from the time, you can hear the audience gasp.Reagan didn’t use the phrase “welfare queen” — he left that to the headline writers. His euphemism was “the woman in Chicago,” but the message was clear “The audience knew what this welfare-swiping villain looked like,” Josh Levin writes in his new book, “The Queen.” “She was a lazy, black con artist, unashamed about cadging the money that honest folks worked so hard to earn.”A new political trope was born, and the specter of the “welfare queen” has been with us ever since, a cudgel hauled out by right-wing candidates and cable news hosts to demonize the poor and justify limiting public benefits.But there’s a wrinkle to the story: Reagan’s “woman in Chicago” was a real person, a mother named Linda Taylor, who had indeed been in the headlines for welfare-related “irregularities,” let’s call them. Taylor’s story has long been forgotten, if it was ever widely known, and many have long assumed that the “welfare queen” was an urban myth. With “The Queen,” Levin, the national editor at Slate, attempts to excavate the gritty, smudgy truth beneath the political rhetoric.I settled in, expecting to read a story that punctured Reagan’s indelible stereotype. Surely, the “woman in Chicago” would turn out to be an honorable, hard worker who had been unfairly maligned and chewed up in the maw of presidential politics.Nope. Levin’s book is much stranger than that because here’s the thing: Linda Taylor actually was a scam artist who cheated the system quite prolifically and without the slightest compunction. She turns out to have been a scammer of historic proportions, a woman so protean that she had gone by at least eight different names by the time she was 22. She was, apparently, a kidnapper. Levin even suggests that she committed murder. Taylor made a cameo on the national stage in 1974, after George Bliss of The Chicago Tribune wrote a series of articles about her case and headline writers dubbed her the “welfare queen.” “The Queen” contains so many strange events that it doesn’t come as a giant surprise that a detour into the tragic life of Bliss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, ends with him killing his wife and then committing suicide.Another author would have used the “welfare queen” as a jumping-off point to explore stereotypes, welfare politics and political rhetoric. Levin addresses all that, but his real goal is to put a face to Reagan’s bogeywoman, tracking every alias, every scam, every duped husband and every dodged arrest. He presents Linda Taylor not as a parable for anything grand, but as a singular American scoundrel who represented nothing but herself.Levin first wrote about Taylor in a in 2013. In “The Queen,” he tracks her from her birth in 1926 in the wonderfully named Golddust, Tenn., to arrests in Seattle and Oakland, a possible murder in Chicago in 1975 and a nursing home in Tampa. And there’s much, much more.Part of the fun of Levin’s book is burrowing inside his obsessive quest. He tracks down vintage court transcripts, old property deeds, marriage licenses, handwriting tests, yellowed police records, ex-husbands of former roommates. What emerges is a quite unsettling picture of a woman who in Levin’s telling seems to have no conscience and no morals, no loyalty to her own children or to any of her many, many husbands. Her crimes are so sprawling and confusing that at times she seems almost like a Keyser Söze master villain. There are hints of buying and selling children on the black market. There’s a sickly woman who winds up dead shortly after Taylor befriends her. At various points, Taylor comes across as mentally ill, pathological in her lies and perhaps unable to distinguish what’s real from what’s not. At other times, Levin suggests that she seemed to know precisely which lever to pull, which name to use, which tragedy to invoke, in order to get what she wanted. Although “the welfare queen” became a way to demonize black women, Taylor is such a phantom that even her race is a matter of debate. She was listed as white on the 1930 census, white and Mexican on a 1945 arrest report, and Hawaiian during a 1946 arrest. According to Levin, she was most likely the product of her white mother’s relationship with a black man. Whatever the case, Taylor spent most of her life changing her race, along with her name, as often as it suited her.Reagan failed to win the Republican Party nomination in 1976 but he went on to win the presidency in 1980 and continued to use the story of the “welfare queen” while in the White House. Once in office, he gutted welfare and a million people lost their food stamps.So, after all this, who was Taylor, really? What was she like to talk to? What was she after? Through dogged reporting, Levin succeeds in building a timeline of her life, but she remains tantalizingly out of grasp, always one step ahead of our detective reporter who is left shuffling receipts from the wastebasket and scanning the horizon for her shadow.Taylor’s story is so tangled and baroque that it makes you wonder about all those other semi-anonymous humans who have been drafted to serve as political metaphors. Who was Joe the Plumber, really? Are we certain J.F.K.’s gravedigger checks out? Is it time for a biography of Khizr Khan, the gold star military father from the 2016 convention?

Linda Taylor, or whatever her name was, died in 2002. Levin argues that she belongs in the pantheon of American grifters, up there with P. T. Barnum, Huck Finn’s Pa and Anna Delvey — characters who captivate us with promises that we will learn something about ourselves, if only we could catch them

After I finished Ghostly Matters, I started a research project that I thought would result in a normal academic book whose purpose was to redefine what utopian thinking and practice had meant and could mean if, for example, slavery and prison abolition or the Jubilee anti-debt movement were examples of it. The impetus for the book was twofold. One was to challenge the twinned triumphalism of the Right’s ‘End of History’ claim and the left’s claim that the political universe had closed shut after the failures of 1968. Both seemed completely out of touch with the remarkable wave of anti-capitalist resistance by diverse peoples across the globe, which remained invisible to many until first the Zapatistas and then more widely the Seattle WTO protests woke them up. And both used the utopian as a rejectionist epithet: ‘That’s not realistic, that’s utopian!’ The other impetus was a desire to pick up where Ghostly Matters ended, with those ‘historical alternatives’ that ‘haunt a given society’, as Herbert Marcuse (1969) wrote; to find the place where, as Patricia Williams (1991) put it, our ‘longings’ are ‘exiled’. Both prompts suggested the need for a more capacious language suitable for what seemed to me a significant historical moment of political–economic retrenchment and resistance to it. I was interested to see if the term utopia could be made to mean something more than the future perfect no-place imagined as a little white nation. When I started the project, the term was still in its ‘discredit’ phase, as you put it. The discourse of utopia had been roundly criticized for its idealism and futurism, but not much for its deeply racialized historiography and its narrowly exclusive set of literary, aesthetic, philosophical, historical and sociological references. This became very clear in 2000 when, as the academic field of utopian studies was gaining ground, the New York Public Library and France’s Bibliotheque nationale organized a large exhibit, online archive and publication program in 2000 entitled Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. This project, characteristically, established the genocidal settler colonialism that founded the so-called new world as a successful utopian enterprise by absenting entirely what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call ‘the many-headed hydra of the seventeenthcentury revolutionary Atlantic’, those slaves, maids, prisoners, pirates, sailors, heretics, indigenous peoples, commoners and so on who challenged the making of the modern world capitalist system. I went in search of the utopian thought and practice in this zone of exclusion – what I called the other utopianism – with its distinct onto-epistemological affects and its historical roots in slaves running away, marronage, piracy, heresy, witchcraft, vagrancy, vagabondage, rebellion, soldier desertion and other often illegible, illegitimate or trivialized forms of escape, resistance, opposition and alternative ways of life. I did find this other utopianism, for sure, but as a living tradition, not as an academic object or subject. When, over time, there was a sea change in the term’s fortunes, and a mini academic industry developed around it, all interesting and to the better for the concept, we at the Hawthorn Archive were somewhat far away from all that. New arrivals sometimes brought an enthusiasm for the term that old-timers no longer had, but if they stayed it dissipated out of lack of need for it. In other words, the now in your question is everything. Thinking in utopian terms is important and necessary for social struggle, for remembering what one fights for, for giving it language and form. Once you’re already living in what I call in-difference, you don’t need that language in quite the same way.

This dynamic recalls Wolfgang Streeck’s argument that the retreat of public goods in EuroAmerica has led to an expansion in private household debt. Due to a combination of fiscal straight-jacketing, financial deregulation, and stagnant wages, people have turned to debt to finance decent standards of living, in effect mortgaging their future incomes to meet present, demanding needs. Debt is a crucial mode to “buy time,” but not all debt is created equally; minoritized persons, female-headed households, and low-income people struggle to access credit at a duration and price that actually works in their favor. Too often efforts to “financially include” working people—whether in Kenya, the United States, or elsewhere—take the form of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls “predatory inclusion.” Short-term initiatives ultimately undermine long-term flourishing, not least because they do nothing to confront the discriminatory logic embedded in the market and in financial policies. So, what can be done to build economies in which working people are not driven by the short-term capitalist dictates of rent, debt, and commodification? What kind of economy might allow working people to plan their own futures? To begin, we should broaden the scope of contemporary progressivism, which too often looks solely to the North Atlantic for inspiration. Maintaining the late colonial conceits of “welfare for us” and “development for them” blinds Euro-Americans not only to the problems common across the globe, but also to the lessons that might be gained from other counties. Whatever insights the era of Keynesian capitalism might offer progressives today, we should not forget its limits. The political economy manifest in the Treaty of Detroit was racially exclusive, built on the backs of unwaged women, and premised on resource extraction from postcolonial settings; it offered little to those who imagined a life outside of waged work. Instead, it sought to prune the edges of industrial capitalism, securing retirement, vacation time, and a system of relief for those temporarily out of work on a temporary basis. For many, the call for a guaranteed basic income today is an extension of this logic. We must move beyond the idea that economic justice can be achieved through redistribution, and instead move toward a conception of the economy that gives working people productive power. Appreciating the significance of controlling assets, not just income, might produce a more fulsome political imagination. Recall the exoduses from Delhi, Nairobi, and other postcolonial cities as COVID-19 spread and, with it, closures were announced. For many leaving was an act of desperation, but these departures drew on long-standing repertoires for managing uncertainty. In Kenya, the context with which I am most familiar, urban workers remain committed to agrarian lands for both sacred and emotional reasons. But these enduring ties to the land also provide an important a material strategy. Where retirement accounts are rare and urban livelihoods volatile, owning a small farm—or contributing to the upkeep of a family plot—is economically sensible. A piece of land—mostly vegetables, perhaps some crops to market—offers a safety net that the state does not provide. As Lyn Ossome put it, “land forms the primary basis for social reproduction… [so even] as agriculture’s contribution to the GDP of most African countries has steadily declined, the relevance of land and landed resources, especially access to the commons, has continued to rise.” Owning land provides an escape from the commodified world of the city, rental housing, and privatized utilities. It does not depend on a redistributive system of taxes and welfare, rather it provides a productive asset that offers future security. We must move beyond the idea that economic justice can be achieved through redistribution, and instead move toward a conception of the economy that gives working people productive power. While we obviously shouldn’t expect a mass turn to farming among the office workers of Euro-America—and taking into account that demographic, ecological, and economic transformations strain the model around the world—we should consider what alternative types of property and assets might be created or redistributed. Projects that boost popular property ownership carry a bad reputation owing to their role in unmaking mid-century social democracy. Margaret Thatcher’s “popular capitalism,” for instance, undermined councils and public provisioning in the 1980s. More generally, the turn to wider shareholding obliges people to become entrepreneurs, yoked to financial shocks and subject to the market power and manipulations of large financiers.

Revenue Adequacy and Sustainability Are Racial Equity Issues Unlike the federal government, in most instances states and localities cannot operate on a deficit. This means that most revenue needed to provide essential services to residents must be derived from taxes and fees. An equitable tax code must adequately fund necessary services and must have long-term sustainability. The most vital function of any tax code is to provide adequate funding for the public services and institutions needed for broadly shared economic prosperity. Far too often, communities of color are asked to bear the brunt of regressive tax systems both by contributing a larger share of their income in taxes and by enduring cuts to programs when overall funding levels fall short. Tax policy choices do not occur in a vacuum. They reflect society’s biases and values. When a local government raises revenues via fines and fees and disproportionately targets underserved communities with violations, it can send lower-income people into a spiral of debt from mounting fees and penalties, and in some instances, it unjustly criminalizes people who cannot afford to pay. Similarly, when a state or local government shifts taxes away from those most able to pay (e.g., by reducing personal income taxes) to those least able to pay, it increases inequity and threatens tax adequacy. Perhaps the most well-known example of racial biases and inadequacy in tax policy choices is California’s Proposition 13. Passed by popular vote in 1978, the measure prevented property assessments and taxes from keeping pace with rising home values under the guise of protecting middle-income homeowners. This insulated established white homeowners from increased taxation and shifted the burden onto new homeowners who were more likely to be Hispanic and Black. It also ravaged the state’s property tax base, stripped available funding for public schools and dropped California’s school rankings from “First to Worst.”[73] Passage of the measure was a dramatic shift from the previous consensus among people and the business community that taxes should be able to keep pace with the cost of funding vital public investments, from water projects to public education. The state, once majority white, was growing increasingly diverse. A vocal Black and Hispanic population began demanding equity in education, housing, job opportunities and other areas of life. Growing white resentment and campaign rhetoric centered on so-called taxpayers and takers contributed to the outcome, which had lasting effects on California communities’ ability to raise revenue. Nearly three decades later, tax cuts and spending cuts damaged low-income communities and communities of color in Kansas. In 2011, Gov. Sam Brownback’s overhaul of state government included massive income tax cuts that primarily benefitted the highest-earning Kansans. The policy changes also resulted in cuts to public benefits program spending and a restructuring of school financing formulas in a way that primarily harmed poorer districts. While the Brownback income tax cuts primarily benefitted high-income white households, the accompanying increase to sales taxes and elimination of targeted low-income tax credits resulted in a tax increase for the lowest-earning 40 percent of Kansas taxpayers. This hurt many white families—the state is over 85 percent white and the vast majority of poor Kansans are white. But Black and Hispanic Kansans are overrepresented among low earners, meaning most Black and Hispanic Kansans faced a tax increase from the so-called Brownback tax cuts.[74] These low-income households of color were also hurt by reduced per pupil spending in public schools and a failure to expand Medicaid.[75] These examples from different states and time periods illustrate the importance of a tax structure that not only collects revenue in an equitable way, but also collects an adequate and sustainable amount of revenue. Advancing racial and economic equity through tax policy requires as much.

Executive Summary Historic and current injustices, both in public policy and in broader society, have resulted in vast disparities in income and wealth across race and ethnicity. Employment discrimination has denied good job opportunities to people of color. An uneven system of public education funding advantages wealthier white people and produces unequal educational outcomes. Racist policies such as redlining and discrimination in lending practices have denied countless Black families the opportunity to become homeowners or business owners, creating extraordinary differences in intergenerational wealth. These inequities have long-lasting effects that compound over time. State and local tax policies interact with this severe inequality in important ways. Revenues raised through taxes are vital to funding public investments in education, health, and the safety net, all of which can help combat inequality. But some state tax systems exacerbate racial income inequality by taxing low-income people, a disproportionate share of whom are people of color, at higher rates than other families. Such regressive tax structures can make racial income inequality worse as incomes become more unequal after state and local taxes. A progressive system for raising revenue, however, can narrow racial income gaps by asking more of families with the highest incomes, who are predominately white. When state policymakers leave immense racial and ethnic income inequality unaddressed in state tax codes, they solidify that inequality. It is difficult for policymakers and the public to fully understand the impact of tax laws across race and ethnicity in part because tax return data do not include information on taxpayers’ races. To fill this void, we have merged tax and survey data within our microsimulation tax model to allow for race and ethnicity-specific tax estimates. We use this new capacity in this report to illuminate how state and local tax policies have differential impacts across race. Consumption taxes, most notably general sales taxes, are the most regressive type of taxes relied on by state and local governments and the most significant drivers of racial inequity in state and local tax codes. Low- and middle-income families pay a larger share of their incomes in consumption taxes than the rich. While most low-income taxpayers are white because they remain a majority of the U.S. population, a disproportionate share of Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and other households of color are in lower-income groups due to the legacy of racist public policies and ongoing discrimination. So, policies that disadvantage low-income individuals and families—like heavy reliance on sales and excise taxes—have a disproportionately negative effect on people of color. Wealthier white families, who enjoy systemic advantages that have positioned them to save and build their wealth, tend to pay lower sales and excise tax rates since the portion of income set aside into savings is only taxed after a lengthy delay, if at all. Income taxes can help to address income inequality by asking more of families with higher incomes, thus narrowing post-tax income gaps between high and low-income taxpayers. Flat-rate income taxes, or those littered with carveouts for investors or other high-income families, have limited potential to reduce yawning racial income gaps. Robust, progressive personal income taxes—which include meaningfully graduated tax rates, broad bases, and significant refundable low-income tax credits—are more effective at narrowing the racial income gap. Income taxes are, of course, just one part of a much larger package of policies needed to address inequality as evidenced by the fact that states with robust income taxes continue to experience severe racial income inequality even after those taxes are applied. The effect of real estate property taxes across race and ethnicity is nuanced and complex. Vast differences in intergenerational wealth and a long history of racist housing policy have allowed white households to achieve homeownership rates far beyond those in communities of color. Those forces, together with white homebuyers’ aversion to living in areas with large nonwhite populations, have also led to significantly higher market values for white-owned homes relative to those owned by people of color. These factors can lead to higher property tax payments and, as a result, better-funded schools in majority white areas. But renters, a disproportionate share of whom are people of color, also pay the property tax indirectly through their rent payments. Compounding the challenges in property tax payments, housing segregation and assessment discrimination can result in higher tax bills for people of color relative to what white homeowners in similarly valued homes pay. The overall tax level also has important consequences for racial equity, as states need robust revenues to fund deep investments in services and institutions that can advance racial and economic equity. Adequate funding for education, health, childcare, affordable housing, and other priorities is essential for moving toward broadly shared prosperity. A regressive tax code that asks the least of high-income families will struggle to raise adequate revenues during times when affluent, predominately white families, are enjoying an outsized share of all new income growth. One way this report illustrates the disparate impact of various tax policies is by comparing and contrasting taxes in Tennessee and Minnesota, two states with dramatically different tax codes. Tennessee does not levy a personal income tax, relies very heavily on sales taxes to fund public services and institutions, and does not offer any refundable credits to low-income families. As a result of these policy choices, Tennessee’s tax code is worsening racial income gaps. Hispanic and Black families are taxed at higher average rates than higher-income white residents. Relative to the statewide average, Black families tend to pay an additional 1 percent of their income in Tennessee state and local taxes while Hispanic families pay an additional 0.9 percent. Minnesota, by contrast, levies a robust personal income tax with refundable credits for low-income families and higher rates for top earners, thereby allowing the state to rely less heavily on regressive sales taxes. Minnesota appropriately taxes lower-income groups at rates slightly below the statewide average. Black families, for instance, pay a rate 0.4 percentage points below average while Indigenous families pay an average rate 0.5 percent below average, and Hispanic families’ average rate is 0.7 percent below average. White families, by contrast, pay slightly more on average because they have higher average incomes. Overall, by tending to tax people of color at slightly lower rates than white families with higher incomes, Minnesota’s tax system slightly mitigates racial income inequality. Of course, high-income households of color pay taxes above the state average and poor white families pay tax rates below the state average. And to be clear, racial income inequality remains intact post tax in Minnesota. Different tax types have varying impacts on the racial income divide, which has significant implications for reformers seeking to overhaul their tax codes. Centuries of policy advantage and privilege have led to a significant overconcentration of white families among the nation’s top earners. Because of this, tax policies designed to benefit high-income or high-wealth taxpayers—like cutting top income tax rates, affording preferential tax treatment to investors, neglecting to levy estate taxes and other forms of wealth taxation, and funding government mainly through regressive consumption taxes—primarily benefit an affluent group of families that is overwhelmingly white. Similarly, increasing sales and excise taxes to buy down income tax or property tax rates, as many states have done in recent years, tends to redistribute income away from moderate-income families of all races and mostly toward wealthier white families instead. Raising income taxes to lessen reliance on regressive sales and excise taxes can help state tax systems move toward easing the racial income divide, or at least not worsening it. Taxing the rich at higher rates is arguably the most important thing state and local governments can do to improve racial equity in their tax codes both because of the direct effect of the tax on narrowing income divides and because of the public investments made possible by the revenue that such a reform can raise. Higher taxes on top earners, a group that is disproportionately white, allow states to use their tax codes to reduce racial inequity. Socioeconomic disparities by race and ethnicity extend beyond current income levels, and it is important to account for those differences when assessing the impact of taxes on racial equity. Years of racism and discrimination across all segments of society—the housing market, labor market, financial industry, education systems, criminal justice, and other areas—have prevented people of color from building wealth on the same level as white families. Policies that advantage wealth, such as tax subsidies for investment or business income, therefore disproportionately favor white households even if income is held constant. Similarly, Black and Hispanic households are much less likely than white households of the same income level to own their homes, and this tilts certain tax policies such as the mortgage interest deduction, property tax deduction, exclusion of gains on home sales, and other homeowner-only tax breaks heavily in favor of white households. Policymakers can generate more economic and racial equity with better decisions about state and local taxes. By enacting progressive income taxes with more brackets at the top, restoring estate or inheritance taxes, taxing earnings from wealth at least as much as earnings from work, and taxing wealth itself, policymakers can meaningfully address economic and racial inequality and create a more equitable nation.

Even if it were possible for Black wealth to grow faster than white wealth despite the headwinds identified by Piketty, it would still take unbearably long. Last year, Ellora Derenoncourt, an economist at Princeton University, and three colleagues at  German universities that examined the evolution of the racial wealth gap since the end of the US Civil War. The paper’s authors estimate that even if Black and white wealth grew at the same rate—that is, with equal capital gains, rates of return, and savings rates, all unlikely outcomes of a system where having money helps generate more money—it would take over 200 years to close the racial wealth gap (2). Using more realistic assumptions that project forward the economic patterns of the past 50 years, the authors add that the answer to when the racial wealth gap will close, “strikingly, is never” (15). In response to these dire predictions, Hamilton has proposed that the federal government provide each child that does not already have a trust fund with such a fund upon birth. Children born to families with the least wealth would get the biggest endowments, up to $60,000. When they turn 18, account holders could access the funds for investment—to pay for college, buy a home, or start a business. While this would certainly make a significant dent in the racial wealth gap, it does not directly address the Piketty principle: so long as white fortunes are growing faster than Black ones, the racial wealth gap will persist. Darity and his coauthor, A. Kirsten Mullen, have made a more ambitious proposal advocating for reparations for Black Americans for slavery, Jim Crow, and current racial discrimination. This proposal calls for the US federal government to make direct payments, totaling $10 to $12 trillion, to each Black descendant of Africans enslaved in the US (controversially, the program would exclude Black immigrants). Putting aside whether such a proposal will ever gain majority support in Congress, would it actually close the racial wealth gap for good? While it would immediately close the wealth gap, such a proposal would not guarantee that the racial wealth inequality would not re-emerge. Again, so long as the returns to white wealth remain higher, then white wealth will eventually outpace Black wealth. The problem, as Piketty demonstrates, is that capitalism is an inequality-producing machine. One of the threads uniting the Black radical tradition is the assertion that it is impossible to achieve racial equality in a capitalist society. For at least a century, Black Marxists like WEB DuBois, CLR James, and Claudia Jones have argued that capitalism cannot survive without racism, which allows capitalists to “divide-and-conquer” the working-classes. Emphasizing racial divisions hinders workers from organizing stronger unions, lowering the wages of both white and Black workers.  Without racist ideas to justify glaring social inequalities, a capitalist social order would be a lot more unstable and susceptible to radical challenges. As historian and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore states bluntly, “capitalism is never not racial.”Even if promoting Black capitalism could close the racial wealth gap, is our vision of a just society in the US simply one where the top one percent is roughly 13 percent Black, 18 percent Latinx, six percent Asian, and 1.5 percent Native American—ie, one where the elite looks more like the mass of workers it exploits? Is massive wealth inequality justified so long as it is not racialized? Are poverty wages less miserable because your boss is Black? Is substandard housing less dangerous because your landlord is Black? Are monopoly prices any more affordable because the company is Black owned?There is something deeply ahistorical underlying current efforts that ignore and indeed reproduce previous efforts to combat racial inequality by employing the strategies of Black capitalism as the primary path. Even if Black capitalism can ultimately “deliver” racial equality, the data suggests it would take centuries do so. Moreover, our horizon for social justice should be far more profound than simply diversifying the elite. As long as capitalism remains an “inequality producing machine,” it will prevent racial equality. Fred Hampton, the charismatic young leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party who was murdered by Chicago police and the FBI in 1969, explained this succinctly: “We’re not going to fight capitalism with Black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.” Black communities have long pursued an alternative approach to racial equality founded on collective ownership and democratic management of businesses and housing. As economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard details in her book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Thought and Practice, Black cooperatives are rooted in the mutual aid efforts of the formerly enslaved during Reconstruction. While Booker T. Washington was preaching Black capitalism, WEB DuBois published a book in 1907 titled Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans, advocating for more Black cooperatives. Several prominent leaders of the civil rights movement, like Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, were members of the Young Negro Cooperative League in the 1930s. Now grouped under the banner of the “solidarity economy,” these initiatives promised a more egalitarian society by directly challenging capital’s concentrated ownership. A movement that seeks economic justice without addressing race and other forms of inequality would surely fall grossly short of the mark. But that very same observation, I contend, also applies in reverse: employing Black capitalism as the primary path for achieving racial justice is certain to disappoint. Liberation will only come if we are expansive enough in our vision to address inequality in all its forms.

Performance demands Performance demands refers to the identity performances of racialized people that stem from pressures “... to perform their nonwhiteness and to perform it in a way palatable to the white majority” (Leong, 2013, p. 2207). The librarians expressed great interest in the IT librarian’s language ability rather than expertise and knowledge in their area of work in the scenario. Though the IT librarian’s position is not related to any public-facing work, it is suggested that the librarian’s language capability could be used if needed by the other librarians. The pressures to perform one’s racialized identity/identities is a form of commodification that is selective as well. Leong (2013) explains that often dominant groups will determine what parts of a person’s racialized identity is acceptable to perform, and in the case of the IT librarian, speaking “Chinese” is deemed acceptable if needed when working with Chinese students, however, this is likely confined to that task. Racial capitalism commodifies the performance of one’s racialized identity in specific settings identified by the dominant group. Leong (2013) explains that selected identity performances take “time, money, and psychological resources” (p. 2209) referencing cases where people change their names, hair, and clothing to reflect dominant social norms. Consuming trauma stories. The consumption of racial trauma stories can be observed in the media and literature. Racial trauma can come in many forms from discrimination to physical violence and has a serious mental and emotional impact on racialized groups. Helms et al. (2010) explain that “racist incidents are, at minimum, a form of emotional abuse and, therefore, can be traumatic. Moreover, ethnoviolence, regardless of form, is physical or emotional abuse whose cultural focus may not be immediately apparent to the opposing ethnic groups and thus may go unrecognized as an ethnoviolent event” (p. 55). Racial trauma can cause anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. Hong (2020) explains through personal accounts that racial trauma narratives are often used in stories of individual growth of racialized people, ignoring the larger societal structures (e.g. law, education) including “the racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place” (p. 47). The commodification and consumption of trauma stories uses suffering of racialized people particularly when these trauma stories are created and consumed for and by dominant groups. While some may argue that these trauma stories are necessary to understand and empathize with one’s pain and suffering, this is at the expense of racialized groups that are pushing against the hegemonic narrative of “oppressive logics” (Mueller and Issa, 2016, p. 132). In anti-racism training, stories of racial trauma (e.g. examples of racist incidents) are often used in group sessions to help participants “understand” racism and the impact of microaggressions to overt forms of racism. This group consumption of racial trauma stories imposes further damage on racialized staff and librarians who must re-visit traumatic experiences in the presence of those who may have perpetrated acts of racism and discrimination. Consumption of racist incidents does little to address internalized racist practices in the institution that reinforce racist practices in overt and covert ways. Further that, it does little to address more inherent problematic ideologies such as white supremacy, neoliberalism, and capitalism that help to perpetuate oppressive structures and practice. Cultural performance demands. Some libraries may have outreach programming and events aimed at racialized groups for holidays or educating the larger community through awareness campaigns. Often this type of work is delegated or assigned to racialized librarians, adding more work and pressures to perform identity work. This form of performance demand draws on the assumption of the monolithic racialized experience, that one racialized person represents an entire group. When racialized librarians are asked to perform identity work, they are tasked with cultural education or anti-racism and EDI A discussion on racial capitalism and libraries 135 committee work. Anantachai and Chelsey (2018) found in their study of librarians that identify as racialized women that they experienced heavier workloads and challenges also known as cultural taxation (Padilla, 1994). The librarians interviewed in the study shared experiences of being support for racialized students and faculty along with the emotional labour needed for the day-to-day work. They found that “the intersections between the burden of care and cultural taxation faced by women of color in higher education are already apparent. For women of color librarians, the burdens they face as a result of their intersectional identities are further exacerbated by their professional characterization as care workers” (Padilla, 1994, p. 303). It is important to check one’s assumptions about racialized colleagues and understand that their experiences as racialized people will vary, including cultural knowledge and practices. For example, Chinese New Year celebrations vary in each household and region. There may also have evolved into different practices for first generation, second generation, and immigrant families in North America. Furthermore, some Chinese Americans/Canadians may not celebrate the tradition. Racial capitalism places value on racialized librarians or staff members’ cultural knowledge when there is some capitalistic benefit (e.g. appearing multicultural).

This essay is a preliminary attempt to analyze varieties of disappointment, disillusionment, and exhaustion in contemporary Black critical theory, which I argue is linked to an ongoing crisis of temporality. By “crisis,” I mean a theoretical and affective discrepancy between temporality and history, an experience of time lived and theorized as an accretion of exhausted past possibilities and foreclosed futures. I argue that the experience of living in the aftermath of subverted, annulled, or still unfulfilled freedom dreams across the diaspora has intensified the feeling of disordered time, distorting or displacing an impulse toward engaging what Hortense Spillers calls the “total perspective against which the work of the intellectual unfolds” into ontology, which tends to obscure material conditions and the complexities of Black living (431, italics in original). A “crisis of temporality” has as its flipside a crisis of history, a conceptual blockage on navigating unresolved antagonisms and attachments to outmoded forms of thinking and desiring even as those antagonisms now assume new forms. I offer “Black situation” as a critical and theoretical framework through which to link the experience of time with historical analysis and engage such a perspective toward the end of theorizing what Lauren Berlant has called our “stretched-out present” (5).

The crisis of temporality, as a sense of temporal stuckness, manifests in some prominent strands of contemporary Black critical theory that rely on the sense of a static, quasi-ontological antinomy rather than antagonism or dialectical struggle to account for Blackness. I write more than a year following George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent uprising, a month after his murderer’s unlikely conviction in a Minnesota court, and as the COVID-19 pandemic exhaustingly continues. Ian Baucom’s claim in Specters of the Atlantic (2005) resonates: “Time does not pass or progress, it accumulates.” Time accumulates, he continues, “even in the work of forgetting or ending, even in the immense labor it takes to surrender what-has-been, or to make reparation on it, or to address its ill effects” (330–331). A critique of progress narratives becomes method. He is not alone. We can read him alongside Saidiya Hartman’s 2008 analysis of the “afterlife of slavery”—“skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (6). To a similar effect, Christina Sharpe, invoking Maurice Blanchot, has described the ongoing “wake” of chattel slavery as a “disaster”: at once historical and “deeply atemporal” (5).

When it was revealed in 2015 that Rachel Dolezal, who at the time was president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) Spokane chapter, was a White woman pretending to be Black, it became news all around the world. Dolezal herself says that she is not White because she “identifies” as a transracial Black woman and argues that she has done a lot of good for the community through her works as an activist and educator (). However, it is important to recognize that she received benefits, in the form of employment and financial compensation, based on her blackness, thus taking these opportunities away from actual Black women. This is not the first-time people have appropriated cultures and identities for personal gain. In 2015, it was revealed that Vijay Chokalingam, brother to actress and producer Mindy Kalling, pretended to be Black in his medical school applications to benefit from affirmative actions intended to support Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous students (). In 2020, American professor of African and Latin studies Jessica Krug admitted to faking her Black and Latin heritage (). In these cases, the racial appropriation achieved by physically changing one’s appearance led to the co-opting of resources, positions, and profits meant for Black people. In recent years, this phenomenon has developed to the extent that it gained its own name: Blackfishing (). This term, which takes a twist on the concept of catfishing, that is, tricking people online into thinking you are someone else, refers to the practice of (mostly) White women pretending to be Black by using makeup, hairstyles, and fashion that originate in Black Culture to gain financial benefits. This article aims contextualize the concept of blackfishing through a critical literary review that will cover the following elements: cultural appropriation, the commodification of Black culture, the representation of Black women in North America, and the operationalization of blackfishing. The  defines cultural appropriation as “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.” There are three main elements that need to be highlighted here. First, this definition implies that the “appropriator” is not part of the group to which the cultural element itself belongs. Second, this concept implies the act of “taking or using” cultural elements, meaning that whoever is engaging in this process can engage with the culture on their own term, thus indicating that power dynamics are at play. Third, and perhaps most important, the cultural element is taken out of its context in a way that either does not credit its origins or is disrespectful to its meaning. A good example to illustrate this definition is the wearing of “native headdresses” by nonindigenous folks at events like Coachella. In North America, indigenous people have been made subalterns through settler colonialism and white supremacy (; ). As a result, there exists at both the macro- and micro-social level a power dynamic between indigenous people and non-indigenous people who live on these lands. In State of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century,  describe those power differentials in the Canadian context as follows:The racial and gendered politics of the state were organized through a complex triangulation of relations, with Indigenous peoples marked for physical and cultural extinction, European settlers for integration, and people of colour for perpetual outsider status as “immigrants” and “newcomers.” (pp. 4–5)Here, we see that indigenous peoples’ positioning is different to that of nonindigenous peoples, and is specifically subservient to that of Europeans, in a way that threatens their culture and continued existence. As a result, there is an inherent power differential that is enacted when someone who is not indigenous decides to take headdresses out of their context to wear them as fashion accessories. In addition, the significance of headdresses in indigenous communities, while varied, is generally associated with status and achievements. By wearing one without having the necessary qualifications, a nonindigenous person is removing it from its original context in a way that disrespects the traditions of the community. identify two main ways in which cultural appropriation can create harm. First, cultural appropriation could imply infringement of legal property rights. For example, both Khloe Kardashian and her sister Kylie Jenner were accused of stealing designs made by Black creator Destiny Bleu and Black-owned brand Plugged NYC (). In these cases, the Kardashian–Jenner sisters took cultural items that were both inspired African American fashion from the 1990s and created by Black designers. In doing so, and without crediting the creators of the clothes nor paying them to use the designs, their appropriation of elements of Black culture simultaneously infringed on intellectual property rights owned by Destiny Bleu and Plugged NYC. The other potential harm identified by  is “an attack on the viability or identity of cultures or their members” (p. 5) The authors go on to write: Appropriation that undermines a culture in these ways would certainly cause devastating and clearly wrongful harm to members of the culture. If appropriation threatens a culture with assimilation, the same moral issues are raised. Other acts of appropriation potentially leave members of a culture exposed to discrimination, poverty, and lack of opportunity. (p. 5) They in essence present the argument that the symbolic harm caused by appropriation as an enactment of power dynamics causes concrete consequences for the culture of origin and its people. Their legitimacy in society and the meanings they ascribe to their own symbol are negated in favor of those who are appropriating. In addition, cultural appropriation leads to benefits for those doing the taking, whether financial or social, and prevents the original peoples from accessing those same gains. When Kylie and Khloe launched products based on stolen designs, they not only financially benefited from the sales, but also prevented less known Black designers from earning profits on their creation. The mechanics of cultural appropriation thus maintain racial and ethnic hierarchies that effectively disempower communities that are already marginalized.This leads us to a discussion on how the appropriation and commodification of Black culture have served to enact white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy as interlocking systems of oppression. In the introduction of The Black Culture Industry,  writes the following: Any residual menace still lurking in African American practices and pursuits has been domesticated, leaving a black culture capable of being adapted, refined, mass-produced, and marketed. Whites not only appreciate black culture: they buy it. A great many blacks have become rich on the back of it. An even greater number of whites have prospered. (p. 1) The integration of Black culture in contemporary capitalist frameworks has served to “domesticate” the stereotype of the dangerous African American, but only insofar as it can be consumed. This consumption, Cashmore is pointing out, is not universal. Black culture is intentionally being made palatable to a White audience, with the goal of making a profit. This is neither an accidental development nor the natural progression of anti-racist activism. It was a planned transformation orchestrated by capitalists who saw an economic opportunity. In the text, Cashmore emphasizes the dangers of forgetting this fact, as he states, . . . inflating the significance of black culture may work against tangible enhancements to the lives of African Americans. The most significant value of black culture may be in providing whites with proof of the end of racism while keeping the racial hierarchy essentially intact. (, p. 2) Rather than being a successful integration of Black people into the public sphere, the commodification of Black culture is a superficial show of tokenized representation that serves to obscure the ways in which this process has not only failed to create deep social changes but has effectively enacted existing power dynamics. This becomes particularly evident once questions of intellectual property and ownership are brought into play. A recent example is the difference in popular discourses regarding Taylor Swift’s decision to remove her content from streaming services versus that of Jay-Z to do the same and launch his own streaming platform named Tidal. In 2015, Swift, supported by her label, announced the decision to remove her works from Apple Music following the company’s decision not to pay royalties to artists during new users’ 3-month free trial (). The singer argued it would detrimentally affect less known artists (). Her published statement received an outpouring of support from artists, labels, and fans, and media outlets framed this as her standing up against big corporations on behalf of small creators (). That same year, Jay-Z launched the streaming platform Tidal with 15 fellow Artist Shareholders with the goal of ensuring that artist be paid fairly for their work (). From its announcement onward, both business experts and the general public predicted that it would fail, and Jay-Z was mocked incessantly (; ). Both Taylor Swift and Jay-Z were making the same argument: Companies that made enormous profits should respect artist’s work and pay them properly. Yet, while Taylor Swift, a White woman, was praised, Jay-Z, a Black man, was ridiculed. In the end, while Apple Music agreed to change their policy regarding free trials in response to Swift’s critique (), Jay-Z sold Tidal to telecommunication company Sprint (). The discrepancy in support that was provided to Taylor Swift and Jay-Z reflects Cashmore’s argument because it reveals how racial dynamics affect the ability of Black artists to defend their intellectual property the way White artists can. This inequality is also demonstrated through the consumption of Black culture by White audiences. In “Not My Sister’s Keeper,”  states that the increasing popularity of hip-hop and rap music among White youths is a form of voyeurism that allows them to peek at the lived reality of the racial other. This voyeuristic engagement with blackness through the consumption of its commercialized culture is rooted in historical and ongoing processes of racialization (; ; ) and is particularly evident in the way Black womanhood is represented and consumed (; ; ). In “Coming Apart,”  describes how the Black male character in the story realizes the difference between the representation of Black and White women in pornography:What he has refused to see—because to see it would reveal yet another area in which he is unable to protect or defend Black women—is that where white women are depicted in pornography as “objects,” Black women are depicted as animals. (p. 103) This dehumanization and animalization of Black womanhood, especially as it relates to sexuality, is rooted in colonialism and slavery. Before abolition, Black women were legally constructed as cattle: Their bodies and progeny were owned by White masters the same way they owned any animal (). Following emancipation, this association between animals and Black women served to frame their sexuality as one of constant need, thus depicting them as un-rape-able and justifying the assaults committed against them, especially by White men (; ). The penultimate example of this embodied animalistic sexuality lies in the representation of Saartje Baartman as Venus Hottentot. Paraded and exposed around the world as though an animal in a zoo, Saartje Baartman’s entire being was reduced to her body, which was essentialized as Black womanhood (; ). The obsession of White audiences with the shape of her genital, butt, lips, breasts extended beyond her life, and the body that had been dissected by their gaze while she lived was eventually dismembered and studied after her death (; ). She was made to be less than the sum of her parts, and her entire being was confined to its potential for consumption by White audiences. The obsession with Black womanhood as individualized body parts rather than whole beings remains. In Black Looks: Race and Representation,  writes,Although contemporary thinking about black female bodies does not attempt to read the body as a sign of “natural” racial inferiority, the fascination with black “butts” continues. In the sexual iconography of the traditional black pornographic imagination, the protruding butt is seen as an indication of a heightened sexuality. Contemporary popular music is one of the primary cultural locations for discussions of black sexuality. In song lyrics, “the butt” is talked about in ways that attempt to challenge racist assumptions that suggest it is an ugly sign of inferiority, even as it remains a sexualized sign. (p. 63) This isolation of butts in contemporary music through lyrics and visuals, including that created by Black women, maintains its status as an embodiment of blackness and Black womanhood in a way that emphasizes the sexuality of Black female bodies. Often, it is also associated with imagery that reproduces the association between Black women and animals. In , Nicki Minaj released the music video for her song “Anaconda”—a response to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s 1992 song “Baby Got Back”—in which she and backup dancers twerked and whined in a jungle-like setting, with the camera repeatedly zooming in and focusing on their butts. In “Pussy Talk” by  and Doja Cat, the three female artists are shown wearing cat costumes while lying down in a forest, and during dance segments, the camera repeatedly focuses on their genitals, butts, and breasts. The massively popular Video for “WAP” by Cardi and Megan Thee Stallion, which debuted at no. 1 on Billboard, included visuals of the artists in a sandpit surrounded by snakes, repeated close-ups of their butts and those of guest actors Kylie Jenner and Normani, and a scene where  is dressed in a leopard print corset and thong that completely exposes her breasts. In all these examples, the association between the emphasized body parts, the references to animals and wild spaces, and the revealing outfits serves to reinscribe on the artists’ bodies the essentialization of their Black Womanhood. They are sexualized, animalized, and objectified. Referring back to Cashmore, their blackness is being “domesticated” and commodified to be consumed by the White gaze. While the aforementioned examples consider how Black female artist themselves are engaging with existing stereotypes, the expansion of Black culture into the mainstream has led to non-Black women also partaking in the production of consumable medias that implicates blackness and Black womanhood. Railton and Watson examine the implications of this development by using  music video for “Can’t Hold Us Down” featuring Lil’ Kim. The authors write, on the one hand the lyrics refer to a universal female experience (the consistent appeal to “all my girls around the world”), while on the other hand blackness and whiteness are clearly inscribed on and through the bodies of Aguilera and Kim. Indeed, it is the precise nature of that inscription, a process in which Aguilera simultaneously performs whiteness and non-whiteness while Kim is seen to embody “essential blackness.” (, p. 89) What is of particular interest here is that, unlike Lil’ Kim who can only ever embody blackness, Christina Aguilera is able to take on both whiteness and nonwhiteness. The video features the White singer in a Black neighborhood, next to Black women doing their hair, and dressed in a style that associates her with hip-hop and Black culture. The visuals and aesthetics reproduce Black culture as it has come to be commodified in North American popular culture, thus allowing Aguilera to put on these elements and superficially represent this palatable version of nonwhiteness. As an artist, this allows her to capitalize on existing desires from White audiences to consume Black culture. She, however, is still a White woman and thus also retains the privileges that come with her race. At the end of the day, she can choose to take off the hoop earrings, remove her fake tan, and go back to her life away from the “ghetto” without facing any of the challenges a Black woman would. This brings us back to the concept of cultural appropriation and blackfishing. In the early years of her careers, she was marketed as a typical young White female star, with her singing and music firmly anchored in the pop genre. As she grew older, both her music and appearance changed as she engaged more and more with hip-hop and R&B (). The video for “7 Rings” features the singer sporting a dark tan, as well as clothing and accessories popularized by Black fashion creators. Just like Christina Aguilera, Grande uses these visual markers to connotate herself as non-White. The setting emulates the visuals and aesthetics of hip-hop music videos, with a racially diverse cast of similarly dressed women standing and dancing outside and inside a house. Grande herself appears throughout the song in various rooms where she sits on top of a kitchen table, drinks champagne, and dances with her “squad.” Once again, this allows the singer to position herself within Black culture in a way that allows her to capitalize from it. The lyrics for the song also serve to code her as “non-White” as they borrow many terms from African American Vernacular English (AAVE). In addition, multiple lines refer to body parts in ways that reflect the previously described embodied essence of blackness. A line from the chorus states, “You like my hair? Gee, thanks. Just Bought it,” a clear reference to the popular use of wigs and hair extension among Black women. Grande also sings: “When you see them racks, they stacked up like my ass, yuh.” Here, the butt is centered through the lyrics, but what is interesting is the visuals that go along with it. Rather than showing Grande during this line, the video shows the back view of a Black woman “twerking” as the camera focuses on her rear end. The juxtaposition of the lyrics with the visual of a Black female body represents the essence of blackfishing: a White woman taking on black features, art, music, culture as a “look.” It is not her butt that is being shown, but the lyrics make it hers. The visuals support the song’s claim regarding Grande’s body and connotates it as non-White even though her actual body is not what appears on the screen, just as her fake tan makes her appear non-White although she is not. Her presentation is the result of a series of conscious choices to commodify and domesticate blackness by curating it through her own body and self, which she can only do because as a White person she has the privilege to select which parts of the Black experience she wishes to engage with. The parts she chooses are the one that can make her money. In conclusion, this essay attempted to locate the recently developed concept of blackfishing within the broader literature by examining how it relates to writings on cultural appropriation, the commodification of Black culture, and the representation of Black women, as well as the way blackfishing itself is operationalization in contemporary mainstream media. Blackfishing can be understood as the latest development in the consumption of blackness through the appropriation of the Black female body as its essence. By “wearing” Black womanhood, White women can extract from its position in the North American cultural imagination the marketable and palatable parts of Black identity, without having to endure the systemic oppression that shapes it. In short, they benefit from blackness without ever having to give up the privilege of being White. As most other forms of appropriation, this causes harm to both individual Black creators, as their own work and craft is co-opted, and Black people as a collective, through the reproduction of racial hierarchies and power dynamics. Going forward, there needs to be a conscious effort from both academic and activist circles to address the violence inherent to blackfishing. It is also important for non-Black people such as myself to reflect and critically engage with our own consumption of Black culture. Am I perpetuating harm and enacting violence through the way I consume Black content and bodies, or the appropriation of blackness on White bodies? This question is particularly relevant to the way we engage with social medias as a setting in which we negotiate and consume identity. Further research on the use of blackfishing by social media influencers would provide an additional framework through which the concept and its enactment could be explored.

‘Good’ and ‘bad’ jobs have long gripped social, political and academic attention, and the widespread and protracted ‘degradation of work’ has only intensified post-2008 recession and through the global pandemic (Braverman, 1974; Kalleberg, 2021). ‘Bad’ work appears endemic to late capitalism – materialising as ‘underemployment, unemployment, wagelessness, wage repression, in-work poverty, crises of livelihood, precariousness, and emptied-out futures’ (Adkins, 2018: 1). Substantial research connects good work to good health; bad work or no work, in contrast, with poverty, illness and early death (Wadsworth et al., 2010: 9). Indeed, late capitalism seems to be defined by a widening disconnect between the optimism of economic indicators and the grim reality of many people’s everyday working lives and livelihoods. Despite this unsettled status, good jobs often figure in public discourse as a tonic for past damage, as well as a charm for a good future. Hope that good jobs will guarantee a good future has profound consequences for public investments of all kinds, captivating immense political and economic resources (see, for example, the International Labour Organization’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, or the European Commission’s 2019 commitment to ‘create more and better jobs’; Adamson and Roper, 2019: 551). This persists even as critics point out that work might not solve social problems, but instead exacerbate and propel issues of widespread impoverishment and inequality (Adkins and Dever, 2014). Despite these contradictions, the political, social and emotional power of the ‘good job’ persists as an idea, a figure in the social imaginary, in ways that remain poorly understood. In this article, we track emotion in everyday news discourse about jobs at a time of political and economic crisis and reckoning, in order to theorise an ‘emotional social imaginary’ under late capitalism (what we call the morbid romance of the good job), to help us understand how and why we keep deeply investing in economic systems that injure our wellbeing, equity and environment. In Wales, the site of our case study, deindustrialisation, rising levels of insecure, dead-end and low-paid work, along with unprecedented austerity-driven cuts, mean almost a quarter of all people and 40 percent of children, live in poverty (Barnard, 2018). Our material comes from a content analysis research project exploring narratives of poverty in which problems with work (job losses, low wages, immobility, precarity, zero-hours contracts and in-work poverty)1 dominate every other poverty-related topic (Moore et al., 2018; Moore, 2020). These jobs stories, moreover, ring with feeling, figures of speech and of myth, and evocative metaphors, such that jobs emerge as a sore collective concern, and command public investment2 in ways that seem both counterintuitive and poorly understood. To theorise these observations, we develop research on the social imaginary, or how common-sense ideas come into view and come to grip us through discourse, as well as how public feelings like hope might attach us to (and entrap us in) particular economic circuits and futures (Berlant, 2011).

An early reader of this article posed a provocative question: is there anything analytically distinct about the Internet? My answer revealed my priors. “Of course the Internet is distinct,” I wanted to say. But that is arguing from an embarrassingly basic logical fallacy. The question of what the Internet does analytically that, say, “capital” or “economy” or “culture” or “organizations” does not already do is important. My answer is debatable, but the debate is worthwhile. I do not know if the Internet adds something analytically distinct to our social inquiries, but it adds something analytical precision. Other constructs capture important dimensions of social life in a digital society. For instance, one can argue that Silicon Valley is a racial project (Noble and Roberts 2019; Watters 2015) or a sociohistorical construction of racial meanings, logics, and institutions (Omi and Winant 2014). White racial frames (Feagin 2020) or color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva 2006) can elucidate how ironic humor about Black people, Muslims, and immigrants in online gaming platforms reproduces “offline” racism (Fairchild 2020; Gray 2012). These are just two examples of noteworthy approaches taken to studying Internet technologies and “mainstream” sociological interests (i.e., economic cultures and discourses, respectively). Still, sociological practice does not systematically engage with the social relations of Internet technologies as analytical equals to the object of study. If there is anything particular about Internet technologies for sociological inquiry, we should make it explicit. And once explicit, we should give it the same theoretical care as states, capital, and power. Daniels (2013) points us in the right direction when she argued that, “the reality is that in the networked society . . . racism is now global . . ., as those with regressive political agendas rooted in white power connect across national boundaries via the Internet, a phenomenon that runs directly counter to Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of the State as a primary structural agent in racial formation.” Daniels named to the global nature of both racism and the networks of capital we gesture to when we say Internet or digital. It is an argument for bringing back the political economy of race and racism. Internet technologies are specific in how they have facilitated, legitimized, and transformed states and capital within a global racial hierarchy. An app with which underemployed skilled labor sells services to customers (e.g., TaskRabbit) might be a U.S. racial project. But the capital that finances the app is embedded in transnational capital flows. Global patterns of racialized labor that determine what is “skill” and what is “labor” mediate the value of labor and the rents the platform can extract for mediating the laborer-customer relationship. Even the way we move money on these platforms— “Cash App me!”—is networked to supranational firms such as PayPal and Alibaba (Swartz 2020). Internet technologies have atomized the political economy of globalization with all the ideas about race, capital, racism, and ethnicity embedded within. An understanding of the political economy of Internet technologies adds a precise formulation of how this transformation operates in everyday social worlds: privatization through opacity and exclusion via inclusion. Both characteristics are distinctly about the power of Internet technologies. And each characteristic is important for the study of race and racism. Understanding platform capitalism helps us understand how these two characteristics are important. Internet technologies have networked forms of capital (Srnicek and De Sutter 2017; Zhang 2020), consolidated capital’s coercive power (Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum forthcoming; Dube et al. 2020), flattened hierarchical organizations (Treem and Leonardi 2013; Turco 2016), and produced new containers for culture (Brock 2020; Noble 2018; Patton et al. 2017; Ray et al. 2017). By that definition, the Internet has amplified and reworked existing social relations. Platform capitalism moves us toward the analytical importance of Internet technologies as sociopolitical regimes. Platforms produce new forms of currency (i.e., data) and new forms of exchange (e.g., cryptocurrencies), and they structure new organizational arrangements among owners, workers, and consumers (see “prosumers”). Even more important for the study of race and racism, platforms introduce new layers of opacity into every facet of social life. So-called mate markets move from neighborhood bars to dating apps, moving family formation behind a platform’s velvet rope (Hobbs, Owen, and Gerber 2017; OllierMalaterre, Jacobs, and Rothbard 2019). It transforms public education into “online delivery,” locking student-teacher-school interactions into privately controlled black boxes (Woolcock and Narayan 2000). “Smart cities” extract our routine activities from public life, which shapes democratic access to how our communities are governed (Brauneis and Goodman 2018; O’Neil 2017; Walsh and O’Connor 2019). A colleague recently bemoaned the difficulty of negotiating with Facebook for data on political attitudes. Many sociologists share her lament. In our routine work we realize that different rules produce and govern data, from survey to observational, than the rules even 20 years ago. That is but a minor example of the myriad ways platform capitalism’s opacity is qualitatively distinct. That opacity has a logic. Pasquale (2015) argued that ours is a “black box society.” Administrative opacity is a deliberate strategy to manage regulatory environments. It shields organizations, both public and private, from democratic appeals for access and equity. As the state legitimizes the use of digital and algorithmic decision making, it also creates new data worlds (Gray 2018; Milan and van der Velden 2016) to which few sociologists have access. The inaccessibility of these data is part of their value to state and capital interests. Private data worlds where decision making can be veiled from democratic inquiry fuel economic and political commitment to more datafication. This brings about more secrecy. Sometimes, a firm or organization performs secrecy just for the sake of secrecy. This reinforces its ability to do so and its right to do so (Seaver 2017). Pasquale outlined three types of secrecy strategies. One of those strategies, obfuscation, is particularly relevant to the study of race and racism. Theoretically, obfuscation operates much like willful whiteness that can always claim ignorance of statistical discrimination, for example, because it owns the means of discovery. Obfuscation does not mean that someone or some organization does not know these data. It means that the information is difficult to access and often couched in needlessly complex technical jargon or process. As we privatize public goods, Internet technologies promise cost savings (usually by reducing labor) and increased efficiency of whatever task is at hand. Those Internet technologies introduce a web of data extraction and valuation that has significant economic value (Zuboff 2015). Obfuscation becomes a technique of privatization through two processes. One, it extracts data that would have previously been public, publicly available or legally discoverable. Two, it expands obfuscation as a logic, even in organizations or institutions that have a public mandate. When full privatization is not possible, obfuscation privatizes information by making it inaccessible in practice. Information is the vessel for social actions and social facts. If information is inaccessible, the objects of everyday life are too. Although secrecy and means testing for information have always been features of the administrative state and of capital, platform capitalism is about the scale of secrecy, the value of secrecy, and the logic of obfuscation. By thinking about the politics of the Internet technologies embedded in the current political economy, we more precisely capture a set of social relations than occurs when Internet technologies are tangential to our analyses. Thinking about the analytical utility of the Internet also brought to mind one of the most vexing dialectal tensions of racism under platform capitalism. The Internet expands. This “pervasive expansion” (Castells 2010) is near total. It is no longer a question of whether one is “online.” Whether or not one is online, one’s life chances are shaped by online (Fourcade and Healy 2013). That settles the thing. The expansion requires bringing people into the social relations of Internet technologies. That can happen as a user (Ritzer 2015) or as a site of extraction (Amrute 2016) or by producing a surplus population of users and nonusers (McCarthy 2016). This expansive quality sets us on a crash course with a fundamental understanding of what race does. Race (as deployed by racism) excludes. It also devalues and stratifies. But exclusion is one of the most studied aspects of race and racism in social science. The racialized social hierarchy produced these Internet technologies. Also, Internet technologies became a dominant tool of capital because of their ability to expand markets and consumer classes. To both expand and exclude, the platform-mediated era of capitalism that grew from Internet technologies specializes in predatory inclusion. Predatory inclusion is the logic, organization, and technique of including marginalized consumer-citizens into ostensibly democratizing mobility schemes on extractive terms One of the clearest articulations of predatory inclusion comes from work on education, where educational access and its attendant social rewards are extended to excluded groups on extractive terms (Dwyer 2018; Eaton et al. 2016; Seamster and Charron-Chénier 2017). With higher education, predatory inclusion looks like expanding “access” to higher education (and its relation to labor market and status returns) by offering online college degrees that both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations market to African American women (Cottom 2017). When those African American women disproportionately enroll in these institutions, they most often do so by taking on student loans. Some of those loans are publicly subsidized and others are from private lenders. These students’ loans have been shown to be harder to pay off, easier to default on, and more likely to reach negative amortization than student loans taken out at other kinds of institutions by other kinds of students (Scott-Clayton and Li 2016). African American women’s inclusion in higher education comes at a high individual price and with a significant profit to the financial caretakers of that extraction. Predatory inclusion happens not only in education. It operates through credit schemes, consumer debt (Charron-Chénier and Seamster forthcoming) and small business lending (Nopper 2010). It frames how minorities are “included” in homeownership schemes that pervert the value of ownership because of bad loans and racist social policy (Taylor 2019). Although not explicitly named, another example is found in the “gig economy.” This is where waged work has become harder to secure and surplus labor is nominally included in the “digital economy” on extractive terms. These schemes could happen without Internet technologies. But they happen using Internet technologies, and Internet technologies have made these cases more efficient. Moreover, platform capitalism generates the logic, incentives, and capital for these predatory inclusion practices. Whether they use the Internet to affect these practices, the logic of capital that financializes through algorithmic means at a scale made possible because of network technologies makes these particular processes of the digital society

2 Operationalizing nonwhite devaluation Theories of racial capitalism highlight how racial difference is produced and how that relative valuation gets operationalized. This means not only how ideas and practices of devaluation circulate, but how they become institutionalized, and the implications for the racially subordinate and dominant. There are many ways racism can be harnessed by economic processes. I will mention two that are widely acknowledged as manifestations of racial capitalism: land and labor. Land is thoroughly saturated with racism. There are at least two primary land processes to consider: appropriation and access. Appropriation refers to the diverse ways that land was taken from native people, as previously mentioned. Once land was severed from native peoples and commodified, the question of access arose, which is deeply racialized. Numerous laws and practices reserved land ownership for whites. Indeed some groups, such as Asians, actually lost land they once owned (Ruiz, 2015; Curry, 1921). Differential value is also produced and extracted via racialized labor systems – black chattel slavery being one of the most profound examples. Smith (2012) asserts that slavery is one of the key logics of white supremacy: the ability to commodify human beings. Understanding slavery’s history and ballast enables us to appreciate the extent to which devalued black bodies, to paraphrase Ta-Nehisi Coates, have financed both whiteness and the American Dream (2015: 132), and I would add global white supremacy (da Silva, 2007). Recent research reveals the economic contributions of slavery to the US economy and infrastructure, as well as the extreme violence necessary to maintain such a system (Baptist, 2014; Johnson, 2013; Wilder, 2013; for a critique, see Hudson, 2016). Upon slavery’s conclusion, numerous legal and de jure forms of labor discrimination and exploitation limited the life chances of nonwhite workers while boosting the opportunities and status of white ones (Roediger, 1991). Dualwage systems, racially-exclusive labor unions, racialized divisions of labor, share-cropping, and related practices ensured a vulnerable supply of low-wage workers (Barrera, 1979; Saxton, 1995; Almaguer, 1994; Kelley, 1990; Woods, 1998). Racialized economic policy has amplified these effects, as seen in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act’s limited protections for occupations dominated by African American, Mexican, and Asian workers. More recently, Gilmore (2007) has shown how the problem of surplus labor, which is disproportionately nonwhite, has been ‘solved’ by the rise of the prison industrial complex. Just as labor arrangements and economic and social policy are constituitive of economic formations, so too are ecologies of resource extraction, processing, and disposal. Many EJ policies and scholarship conceptualize both racism and waste practices as externalities, rather than as fundamental to the very fabric of racial capitalism. Yet if racism is continually creating differential value, it is only logical that capital (and other nondemocratic economic systems) would incorporate this uneven geography of value into its calculus. As Pellow has noted, the production of social inequalities by race, class, gender, and nation is not an aberration or the result of market failures. Rather, it is evidence of the normal, routine, functioning of capitalist economies. Modern market economies are supposed to produce social inequalities and environmental inequalities. (2007: 17) Industry and manufacturing require sinks – places where pollution can be deposited. Sinks typically are land, air, or water, but racially devalued bodies can also function as ‘sinks’. Taking this a step further, Moore (2015) has argued that capitalism is a way of organizing nature. Specifically, capitalism functions by restructuring nature. And since humans are nature, we must recognize that capitalism is reproducing itself by restructuring humans on a cellular level. This has nothing to do with malicious intent (Pulido, 2000) and other liberal conceptions of racism. Rather, this is capital acting upon a larger differential valuation (Pellow, 2007), or, in the recent case of leadcontaminated water in Flint, Michigan, the neoliberal state, both of which are part of the ‘ecology of capitalism’ (Moore, 2015).