Racial capitalism’s systemic devaluation of nonwhite bodies has structured contemporary economics – produces both social and environmental inequality and causes a racialized restructuring of nature

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).